You could try a different hard drive to see if that's it, but I'd still expect it to boot even with a bad HD since the base OS is kept in on-board rom.
You'll probably end up having to ship it back to Sony, their turnaround time is pretty quick from what I hear, but you won't necessarily get your PS3 back and they don't have any of the originals left so most likely you'll get stuck with a newer one that doesn't have the hardware emulation chip.