I take it you've already demanded the full refund and sent an invoice for your time?
In the future, I recommend removing the hard drive before sending them on to Dell (unless the hard drive is the problem). Dell shouldn't care about the lack of a hard drive; if it does, pop in a temporary drive (as davismwfl mentioned).
Alternately, you can ask Dell to just send you the parts, in which case they'll usually be fine with you performing the swap yourself and sending back the faulty parts. This avoids the issue entirely, at the expense of leaving you with the work of replacing the parts in question (though a keyboard/trackpad replacement isn't that hard on most Dells).
I used to work with Dell machines routinely in a hospital IT department. Dell never gave us grief for removing hard drives prior to sending machines out for servicing (per our internal HIPAA-compliance policy). YMMV for consumer support, but I don't expect that to be significantly different in their case.
In the future, I recommend removing the hard drive before sending them on to Dell (unless the hard drive is the problem). Dell shouldn't care about the lack of a hard drive; if it does, pop in a temporary drive (as davismwfl mentioned).
Alternately, you can ask Dell to just send you the parts, in which case they'll usually be fine with you performing the swap yourself and sending back the faulty parts. This avoids the issue entirely, at the expense of leaving you with the work of replacing the parts in question (though a keyboard/trackpad replacement isn't that hard on most Dells).
I used to work with Dell machines routinely in a hospital IT department. Dell never gave us grief for removing hard drives prior to sending machines out for servicing (per our internal HIPAA-compliance policy). YMMV for consumer support, but I don't expect that to be significantly different in their case.