I received my brand new black 30gb iPod with video on Friday. On Sunday I went for my first outing with the new iPod. I placed it in my pants pocket as I have with previous iPods, being very careful not to place anything else in that pocket, and went about my business. When I returned home about 2 hours later, I was shocked to see that the acrylic faceplate had literally hundreds of tiny scratches. Most of the scratches were on the screen area. It is so badly scratched as to actually distort the video image on the screen.
I read about similar problems with the black Nano but I never expected to have a problem with mine. It certainly seemed that this significant scratching after such a brief period was due to a faulty product, so I called Apple Tech support. I assumed that they would acknowledge the problem and send me a replacement. After explaining what happened to a tech support representative, he stated he couldn't help me and transfered me to another representative.