Casper Restore Partition

I used the Restore partition for many years and if I were still supporting multiple machines in remote locations I'd continue using it. It's still there. Even if it weren't you'd still be able to partition a drive and install whatever OS and tools you want on it.

I never took advantage of the "This is a Restore partition" feature and just installed my own OS with ARD and SSH enabled. It allowed me to remotely troubleshoot and fix problems as well as completely re-image machines. It has its place and is not a substitute for the Recovery HD.

We still use restore partitions on all ~700 of our machines, and it works well. I build as slim an OS as possible, add the casper apps and whatever other tools I need (smultron, winclone, etc). I capture it with Composer as I would any OS base.
With new machines once they come online we resize/replace /Recovery HD with our /Restore at disk0s3. Then we'll put Windows at slice 4 on our dualboots.
You can use chflags to keep /Restore hidden.
I use a script/policy to deploy the latest restore base without really interrupting users.
There are some glitches here and there (like root user doesn't always auto-login) but overall its much more stable than netbooting. Hope that helps a bit.

We used to create the Casper restore partition as part of our OS building process for imaging… now we just use AutoDMG, which creates the Recovery HD more fluidly, like a normal OS install would. It works wonderfully, and we need that Recovery HD there because it sounds like down the road we'll be implementing FileVault2 for all users.