Tip supplied by Rick Nelson (Spamola)

Open a new RGB image. Type your text in black on a new layer.

In the channels palette, drag one of the channels to the "new channel" icon.
This will create channel 4. Duplicate channel four to make channel 5. Invert channel 5 (ctrl/cmd+i) so it appears as white text on a black background.

Make channel 5 active. Now load channel 5 as a new selection. To do this,
you can either hit select/new selection and choose channel 5 from the pull down menu or you can save some hassle and hold the ctrl/cmd key and click on channel 5.

Now you have something that looks like the above image with a selection border
(marching ants) around your text. Invert the selection (ctrl/cmd+shift+i) so that it borders the whole image as well as your selection. I can't get the selection border with my screen capture, so you'll have to use your imagination.  

Tip for new users:

Now you need to get a nice fade on your text that starts with white
on the inside and fades to a dark gray. There's several ways to do this with photoshops native tools as well as third party plugin filters (KPT gradient designer set to circular shapeburst). To keep things simple, first make sure your background color is black (keystroke d, then x). Feather the selection (select/feather) by five pixels and hit delete.

(Still a little too light around the edges...hit delete once more.)

(Perfect!)

We're done playing with the channels. Go back to the layers palette and
select a new layer. Hit ctrl/cmd+d to make sure nothing is selected. Fill it with something...anything! You can use a pattern, solid fill, gradient, image or whatever you want.

You'll be using the "lighting effects" filter to create the beveled look. If you
haven't worked much with lighting effects, don't get frustrated and give up. Once you learn how to use it, you'll find it is one of the most useful filters for all kinds of text effects.

Tip for new users: .

After filling a new layer, open the "lighting effects" menu
(filter/render/lighting effects). If I remember correctly, "lighting effects" is the only thing in Photoshop that uses floating point math to create true 3D effects. It uses a grayscale texture channel to determine what is "high" or "low" depending on the brightness of each pixel.

We'll use a single white light coming from the upper left side. For the light
type and properties, I used the following settings:

You'll probably have some horrible banding. I got rid of it (much to my surprize)
by converting the image to a 64 color indexed mode with difusion dithering.

Remember channel 4? You can load that as a new selection, feather it by
one pixel, and hit delete to remove the background.

Good luck!