Sheesh. This is a terrible experience for you. Something is clearly amis, and I am wondering how it turned out.
I have only ever had one kernel panic ever, and that was on the first 17 inch Powerbook last year as I tried to downgrade after a failed OS upgrade. It had a monstrous 1 GHz processor, and had hardware that clearly was failing.
My only issue with Lion is the way Mission Control seems to hide windows on me at times.