Time machine for me is the big feature of Leopard. I've had very few problems with it, using it in a variety of places. At home I have the Mac Pro and MacBook Air backing up to the ReadyNAS. No hacks, just checked the "Time Machine" option on the ReadyNAS and pointed the two Macs to it. I've done both small file restores and a full system restore on the Mac Pro without a problem.

At work I use the undocumented settings to allow it to back up to SMB. You can restore individual files this way, but you can't do a full recovery. However, a workaround is to move the backup to a USB drive for restore, and I've done this twice now with work machines to migrate to newer hardware, including from a PowerPC Mac to an Intel Mac.

For my family members, I get them Time Capsules. My mom has one used also as a wireless extender from her neighbor. This has backups for both my moms laptop, and the neighbor's Mac Mini. Neither have ever needed to use the restore feature, and they haven't told me about any problems backing up. It's a very set and forget method that works. My grandparents also have a laptop and mini pointed at theirs, and it's their main internet router. I use theirs as an offsite backup too. This works over MobileMe, by typing in my account to their router. This allows me to see it in the Finder on any of my Macs as if it were local. My long term plan here is to have my Pro sync some critical files to it weekly, though I haven't scripted that yet.

The only issues Time Machine has ever given me were under Leopard. I'd get the occasional error on my Pro that it couldn't find the backup drive. In the 2 weeks I've run Snow Leopard, I haven't seen the same error. Having both the hourly and long term backups has come in quite handy. If I am experimenting with something like addons for Warcraft, I can use Time Machine to bring things back to a baseline easily, without having to do manual separate backups. If an hour isn't small enough for my testing, I can initiate a new backup from the menu bar, and it takes only a few moments. I do have a few exclusions to prevent the backups from being large. At work, I excluded the Entourage database, as it's one monolithic file that Time Machine would back up every time. That's no longer an issue though as I've dumped Entourage. I do also exclude my local iDisk (~/Library/FileSync), since I feel having the files on every machine and Apple's servers is enough protection there, and I tend to not need the accidental deletion protection for it.

In the end, sure, some minor issues exist in Time Machine. But it's the first backup solution I use properly on every machine I work with. Carbon Copy Cloner works, but I really never used it much. Between the manual nature of setting it up, managing backup files, and so on, all it did was litter my NAS with things I'd have to clean up later. I think I still have a DMG on there somewhere of my PowerBook from 4 years ago.