Hello!
Yes, I have seen this. In fact, my brand new 17" Macbook Pro (mid september '09, 3.06 ghz, 4gb ram, 7200 rpm SATA) has a very similar problem, although maybe not quite as severe as this. Believe it or not, this new Mabook Pro is a replacement for a previously BRAND NEW defective one. I am very displeased with the quality of Mac's thus far, based on my personal experience. I have spent $3200 on what I exppected to be a beautiful top-of-the-line machine, and am getting sub-par garbage. I realize that everything has flaws, but this is ridiculous. The first defective one had a bad hard disk and would freeze and get kernel panics, right out of the box.
But regarding the uneven backlighting, I have to sympathize with you on this since I am experiencing the same problem. The entire right side of the keyboard is barely lit up after manually turning up the brightness all the way, and the "5%" and a few adjacent keys are very bright, while the left side appears to be normal. I am now trying to determine what I will do. I think I may just do a chargeback on my credit card for inferior quality of goods, which can easily be done if you don't abuse the privilege. Either that, or I will give them one more shot to send me another brand new one that is free of defects. I refuse to take it to the Apple Genius bar where it would have to be opened up. It's a brand new unit, and I didn't overpay just to have it cracked open. Since I see that you had this issue back in January, may I ask what ever became of your issue?