Interestingly, while the answer does hold for 2005+, for us dinosaurs who still have a few SQL Server 2000 systems, it throws a parse time syntax error on the USER keyword first. Renaming to a different column does still yield the duplicate table name error at parse time, but surprisingly it seems to do the syntax check before catching the "duplicate" table name on my legacy system.

I guess it just goes to show you should always specify version numbers.