I agree with your reasoning, it seems very logical. So, why didn't Apple make a couple of partitions on their computers to facilitate the cloning procedure?
A brief bit of history: back in 10.1 we had two Apple programs... Disk Utility and Disk Copy. Only the latter was capable of copying disks. Then later (10.2 maybe?) that functionality was merged into DU, and DC was dumped. My recollection is fuzzy, but i think it was during that interim in which CCC came on the scene with its ability to make bootable clones. [can't recall if DC did that or not in OSX, and i'm fairly certain that Super Duper didn't exist yet.]
But anyway, "cloning" to create a bootable backup was never anything that Apple offered initially.. as far as i recall. In fact Mike Bombich went to work for Apple right around the time that CCC and NetRestore were becoming huge hits... so perhaps it was around that same time that DU started to get beefed up. I'm not sure though.
There is a similar phenomenon with Software Update. Remember back in the "modal" days before OSX, when doing a software update meant
not being able to do anything else? Then OSX came along and didn't enforce any such restriction. Subsequently, some users would continue browsing or playing WoW whilst a software update was underway... only to show up at MacFixIt's fora later on talkin' 'bout how the update hosed their system.
We heard a lot of things here about TM "clones" not being bootable… Do they think that only backing up user's data is necessary and the rest can be restored from original disks if push comes to shove?
You know Apple... everything needs to be (or at least
seem) as simple as possible.
