Yes, you're right, you can create a bootable backup with Vista. That's stuff you can do with 5-year old machines. But Mark is using XP, and I don't remember that to be available back then, even though I may not remember correctly.

I may be missing some feature, as I've played with Time Machine just a few times, but Rescue&Recovery (that comes with all Lenovo Laptops we distribute to users of all types at work, so I've ended up seeing that in action more, in the last years) works exactly like Time Machine. Snapshots in time, automatic if you wish, semi-automatic, manual, and they do delta. One single installation of R&R can be run from within the OS or before the OS, in its own pre-OS environment. Supports multiuser environments, as well as access levels to the backup sessions (based on NTFS, which is good). Handles disk space dynamically, or can be restrained to use a specific amt of it. And has a quite relevant set of advanced features. Not as user-friendly as time machine, as expected.
We have that running on thousands of laptops in the organization and it mostly works fine. Actually, I should say that in our experience it always did, as the only isues we had in years (we'e been using R&R since 2006) were caused by Lenovo (installing a corrupted version of our corporate disk image on 3 thousand laptops, making the base backup in R&R unreadable).

Restore points also finally work in a way I find useful (i Windows 7). But that's a different approach to "backup", if you wish to call it like that. I wouldn't. But, I was reading that R&R can now integrate with restore points to some degree, but I have not explored that much. I also seem to remember othe rsoftware that does the same, taking advantage of restore points, but I can't recall its name.

Still, in my own systems, I find both types of approaches useless. I never used restore points, and I deal with system disk (or any other disk that matters) crashes with mirror or other RAID. HDD are still cheap, I think. As I never had to reinstall Windows on my machines for any other reason, no matter how badly i treated them (and I did treat them badly at times), often migrating the same install from one machine to another when I feel too lazy, I would find R&R or similar (such as TM) very useless for me personally.

Of course, I happen to have laptops with data I backup daily, and system configuration not deserving a disk image (pretty standard). Should my work laptop crash, a reinstall would indeed take more time than drive re-image (not that much, today, when installing from pendrive), but it is such an unlikely event - and reinstall is such an easy process - that I prefer just not to bother with bootable drive image. Last 10 years proved I was right in taking that risk, even if my SSD should fail tonight I've saved a lot of time so far.

Just to share my experience.