Macbook late-2008 and Samsung SSD 830: what happened
Since I cannot directly comment on your question (too little reputation) I'll do it this way by answering it (I know that this is not a real answer, so please forgive me). I'll just cover the supplement of your question. 

I'm using a Samsung SSD 840 PRO in my MacBook Pro (Late 2011 model) without any problems. When installing the SSD I had the same problems as you described, namely "Can't download the additional components to install Mac OS X" during the installation process. For me it helped to download the Mountain Lion installer (or use a copy on another mac) and build the USB disk with the DMG file that is contained in the Mountain Lion installer (this should also work with the Lion installer I guess). Here it is described how it works.

The reason why this is working is that the USB stick  contains all of the necessary data to install (Mountain) Lion whereas the solution given by Apple misses a lot of files that have to be downloaded from the web at the time of installation and the the download failed for me somehow. I'm not sure how you build your USB stick but if you used the way suggested by Apple you should give the other way of doing it a try.