Re-think option 2. If you don't go out and buy an external disk for backup, you're eventually going to be screwed anyway. Not backing up is not a reasonable option.
Sure. I agree with you, and I have external hard drives I back up to.
But I'm not an average user. You're not an average user. To an average user, what you've just said is "If your computer does not come with installation media, that means you need to buy another hard drive, then find disk cloning software and use it."
Yes, a backup hard disk is a good thing to have. No, a requirement to purchase and then learn how to use a backup disk and cloning software is not in my mind an acceptable substitute for shipping a computer with installation media.
What I did was use SuperDuper to clone the InstallESD.dmg image onto my TM backup. (When SuperDuper makes a clone, it will carefully step around any TM backup on the destination volume, leaving it unscathed. The result is a single volume that is both a TM backup and a Lion Install disk.)
That makes your TM backup bootable.
Which is cool, for tech users who know the value of buying additional hard drives and understand cloning. I suspect that leaves out, at minimum, 80% of the computer using public.
If a person buys a computer, I believe that person should have the ability to start that computer in the event of a hard disk failure without resorting to additional expenditures, such as additional hard disks or a reliable broadband Internet connection. I personally find the industry practice of refusing to ship computers with installation media, first started by Dell and Gateway and now apparently picked up by Apple, quite disagreeable.
