People with manuals need to be more concerned because of clutch wear. The DSG seems to be relatively strong.
A lot of this is reiterating what other people have already said, but...
This is a good question that people almost always have really polarized answers to. It's seemingly either, "the stock internals can handle 350 hp forever. Of course you should chip it!" or "it's just not worth the risk of something going wrong." It's nice to see the reasonable responses on here.
If you can wait a few thousand miles, you'll probably see if anything is going to go wrong, with or without the tune. Waiting gives you time to do more research, to see if everything on the car functions like it should, and gives your mind a chance to get used to the power your stock GTI makes. That way you'll probably appreciate the tune all the more--to me it's really like getting a new better version of your car, so letting the new car excitement wear off before upgrading might be a good idea.
It's a really small gamble to just go stage 1, but there is a bit of risk. From what I've read, when components that a stg 1 tune affects fail on a car, it's really unlikely that the tune is what did it. But if you do the tune and something goes wrong as a result, or more likely by coincidence, then you might be in a crap situation. Even still, it seems some dealers are pretty lenient even when it happens. Those events are just really rare, with or without a tune.
After spending $20k keeping a $6k 944 running while I was in college, that I upgraded pretty conservatively, I'm also really risk averse (or I was) about modifications. But, your GTI is not a 15-year old worn out race car, so the chances of something going wrong with the extra boost pressure are very low. With this GTI, I waited until I was bored by my stock car, then chipped it--I made it about two years. I then made it another two months before going to stage 2, and will hopefully make it a full six month from then before swapping in a K04. Be warned that it can be a slippery slope. Even the people who spend months talking about how much they like the car just mildly tuned risk end up doing some pretty heavy mods after a while (...plac
). Mods on this car are like crack. Stage 1 is a pretty big crack rock. Try it, Whitney.