I'll be expecting a Lombard to arrive shortly via USPS. Hopefully it will survive the trip. 
After taking apart a Sony Vaio laptop, I have the DVD combo drive from it. The drive in the Lombard is a DVD-ROM drive.
Besides the front of the drive jutting out about 1/3", would there be an issue with using the Sony drive in the Lombard?
There should be no difference at all. You should be able to take the bezel off the Lombard drive and snap it on the Sony.
I used a throwaway slimline DVD drive with my Lombard when I had it, and while the bezel didn't fit, it didn't stick out of the computer or anything, and it would boot from it just fine.
i'm not sure the bezel will fit. i pulled a sony drive from my dead ibook to try in my mce drive, and the bezel didn't fit. regardless, it should work in the lombard without any issue at all considering sony drives were often used in apple laptops.
Is that one of the newer 1/3" thick jobbies? Or are you referring to a 'normal' 1/2" thick slim drive?
If the latter, then it'll work, just be aware that it may not be set to bus Master and therefore won't boot the Lombard whilst holding the "C" key. If bus Slave, you'll have to do a small mod to force bus Master status.
See my page(s) on the subject. The pages are are a bit old, but since the machines haven't changed since I wrote about 'em the info remains mostly relevant.
Heh, oh yeah, the bezel - you'll be oh-so-lucky if the bezel just fits, very few drives share with other drives the same exact bezel attachment design. If not, just live with the generic bezel.
dan k