Touch Pro keyboard issues

[XRS yo]

I just got a brand spankin new Touch Pro about 2-3 weeks ago. Sprint upgraded me for free from my 8th broken Apache. Very exciting, especially since I was planning on just buying one.

Anyway, I've had nothing but troubles with the keyboard, and I was wondering if anyone else had the same problem(s). Went through dozens of pages of threads, but I haven't found anything quite like this.

Basically, the keyboard works intermittently. When I slide it open, it lights up like it should, and then one of three things happens:

1) It doesn't work at all, and the light goes off after 5 seconds or whatever because it doesn't think I'm pushing buttons. No buttons on it do anything whatsoever.

2) It works, but lags every time I hit the space bar. And when I hit the space bar, the space or the last letter I pushed repeats 5-10 times before it will allow me to continue typing. If I type a sentence, this may happen 4 or 5 times.

3) It works fine (rarely), usually after a soft reset, but then quickly goes back to #2.

I've soft reset it, hard reset it, and tried 2 or 3 different roms. Currently using the stock Sprint rom with no other software installed. It was fine for the first week or so ... maybe a little laggy on input sometimes, but still usable. Is it safe to assume this is a hardware issue?