One question on imaging – would Restore-IT be considered an equivalent? It does daily incremental restore points for all files that have been changed (including deleted) since the previous point, not just system files, so it beats the heck out of system restore in that sense.
Farstone claims it’ll even restore a drive that’s been accidently (or maliciously) reformatted, since it’s on its own partition. But I’m not sure how you’d access it in a case like that, if the main drive including OS is gone.