After two defective Razr V3s in a row, the third phone - a Razr V3i - works. I can install wallpaper, load contact lists, all that good stuff. There's a few irritating glitches with the Motorola Phone Tools software trying to load ringtones on it; I'm assuming it'll turn out to be some poorly documented restriction in the software or something of that nature.
But the important part is, I have a working mobile phone again that gets signal here at the house.
As a bonus, it turns out I did get the gunmetal-grey version. Excellent!
Update:
The ringtone problem turns out to be easy to solve: Don't use the ringtone editor in Motorola Phone Tools. Build MP3 ringtones in Audacity, save as 192kbit MP3 using the LAME plugin (which also works with WinAmp), use Motorola Phone Tools file transfer to load it onto the phone as an audio file, then go to the phone menu and tell the phone to use it as a ringtone. End of problem.
I've created four nicely loopable MP3 ringtones so far. I'll post'em a bit later, but they'll be friends-only.