It's usually a couple of weeks or so, according to what I read on other forums - inconvenient, but not fatal.

Me, I just bought mine from costco. My first Xbox didn't get the ring of death, but was locking up. Took it back, returned it, then turned around and used the costco cash card they gave me to re-purchase a new one.

Less than an hour. You just have to buy your stuff from the right retailer and you won't have problems :rolleyes:

The worst part of the process was moving my saved games off the hard drive onto a memory card before swapping the consoles. That's one advantage of the MS swap process, you keep your HD.