I just got ahold of someone official on the Lenovo forum who seems to express at least a passing interest in my predicament. I guess publicly posting your problems where potential new customers can see them gets their attention better than calling on the phone.
He did explain the hard drive issue. There IS one 250 gb physical hard drive in the machine. The thing is, roughly 33 gb is used up with the one-touch recovery system (and so doesn't display as "used hard drive space" when you get info on the hard drive), and the remaining 217 gb is divided into a 187 gb c:
partition (which has the installed operating system and software, limiting free space to about 150 gb) and a completely-free 30 gb d:
partition. That's why I thought that they shipped my computer with a hard drive that was too small, and stuck a small second one in the slot.
What this doesn't explain is:
(1) Everything else that was wrong with my machine,
(2) Why on earth they would partition a hard drive into c: and d: to begin with (we all know that, for the vast majority of people, one big trunk is a whole lot more useful than two small trunks, right?),
(3) Why the two separate returns people and one tech support person I've talked to so far did not explain this to me when I described the exact same thing about the hard drive, and
(4) Why it apparently takes them 2+ weeks from
receipt of a returned computer to refund the money (their time estimate).