your right, changing the hard drive in the mbp is not user changeable and indeed voids the warranty. best bet is to buy directly from apple and keep it safe.
Or again, buying it from Apple and paying an authorised agent to upgrade it later. You're not likely going to save any money this way though -- I see Apple is charging $225 for a 250gb upgrade. The drives can be found on newegg for about $150. Add $90 for the install and you're over the top already. Since the OP gets a student discount, the upgrade would be closer to $130 anyway...
That sounds pretty good djames. I actually looked the service centers up and found two apple stores listed. Will they do the work if they are listed as a Service Provider? I definitely think I'll have to wait a while longer and just get the money and do this thing right. I already plan to upgrade the ram to 4GB just because of how cheap it is after market and if any capacity hard drive can be installed for less than $100 why risk going too small right? I am curious though if I get a brand new MBP and take it in and get a bigger hard drive put in can I just use the leopard disk that comes with it and install leopard when I get the computer back? I wouldn't do anything serious before I got the hard drive in since this will be over the summer before I head back to school. Thanks a lot for all your guys' help. I didn't think I would get this much help for being a little impatient.
They should do the work, but obviously I'd call first. The two shops here said they'd take it on a drop-in basis, but some shops might want you to schedule it.
As for reinstalling the OS, your MBP will come with a hardware-depending install disk. You boot off it and can reinstall the OS and iLife apps and your system will look the way it came from Apple (only with more free space). You can also install the optional components such as X11 and xcode.
Another alternative however; this is what I have done. Because I intended on keeping my old 7200rpm 100gb drive as an external anyway, I bought a USB-powered SATA 2.5" drive case. When my 320gb drive showed yesterday, I installed it into the external case. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my internal drive to the new 320gb drive. Now when I have the shop move the 320gb drive into my MBP, I'll simply be able to boot right off it.
If you've not installed applications and set up your work environment however, then performing a clean install will be faster (and you can save some space by selectively choosing not to install printer drivers and international fonts you don't need).