Lion Recovery is slowwwww~~~~~

This is what I would say is expected performance for a web restore via Wi-Fi. If you use Ethernet is should be faster, but not much maybe 2 hours. If I need to reimage a machine back to say 10.7.3 I just have a local net install server setup so it's quick. Usually about 20 minutes.

Lion Recovery, IMHO, isn't a viable enterprise restoration method. There are so many different network configurations that it does not support. Even something as simple as someone being at a hotel where to be allowed onto the network you need to click "accept" on a DNS interception page will make it not work.

I'd look for other options if it were me.

I understand Recovery HD is required, but we've got some users set up with an additional hidden full installer partition (using the extracted Lion installer InstallESD.dmg from within the installer app). These are dev users who asked for it, so there isn't a need to go out to the internet to pull down the OS.

That said, we've also given some Lion users a USB thumb drive built from the InstallESD.dmg. Either way they're able to reinstall the OS without our help. They just need to ensure Casper agent is reinstalled.

The last thing we'd ever want to do is allow a user to pull 4 gigs of OS source files down off the internet - the network team would jump up and down on top of us.

Don