I have pulled test files from Time machine without a problem. It's reliable so long as it doesn't experience a failure - that's pretty much like anything.

Lately people on the Apple forums have been collecting stories of Time CAPSULE hardware failures - so I'm not sure if you've heard about those. I know Tom has used Time Machine with other shared volumes - maybe he'll chime in with some notes.

I have however had bad experiences with backups from a number of other methods, including the inability to boot from backups made with both SuperDuper as well as Carbon Copy Cloner.

Anyway, I just mentioned they're not at all the same thing because you had said that you'd heard "CCC was much better" - it's not better nor is it worse. It's just different. One might actually use both, as I do. Time Machine does my incremental backups to a Time Capsule and is on all the time. Then manually every now and then I will use CCC to copy everything to what should be a 1:1 bootable backup. I also use CCC to make backups of other external volumes, such as my music and movie drives.