but it's been pretty well documented that an upright 360 will scratch your media.
This is a myth, I checked into this one thoroughly before buying a 360 and it has been debunked.
There was an earlier brand of DVD player that Microsoft used in a relatively small number of the early Xbox 360's that could have a fault which caused the player to scratch media when it was inserted. This player has since been discontinued and Microsoft will replace the drive of any 360 that has this problem. Generally your 360 will either scratch discs (if you bought an older machine in the above group and for some reason it has been refitted) or it won't.
It is possible to get the drive to scratch discs but only if you move the console while it's operating or have it tilted at an angle. Both of these things you are clearly advised not to do in the manual and you could probably get any DVD player to scratch a disk under those conditions.
There are still a small number of people who claim they never moved their 360 while it was running and were found to still have problems but this was a small sample, based on people with problems and hasn't been replicated on any large scale. We don't know what happened to their 360's before testing and nobody has come forward with problems like that out of the box.
If you run your 360 flat rather than stood up you are very unlikely to have any problems, if only because you are less likely for it to get knocked over.
Darkheart