If what you are describing is possible with Windows now then I'd definitely go for it.

This ability was one of the key things that pushed me over to the Mac years ago. There is a great deal of comfort when you know that:

- it is dead easy to clone the whole system boot drive, while the system is running (on the Mac using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner)
- within seconds of the system drive failing I can be booted on an exact copy of the system drive that "just works*"

In my case I don't mess about with partitions on internal drives for this, it goes onto a dedicated external drive. Not only can I boot my normal MacBook from it, I could plug the same drive into any vaguely modern Mac and boot from it into my normal setup.

I also use it when doing OS upgrades. I make sure I've cloned before hand and don't update the clone for a few days afterwards (sometimes I'll make a second clone on another drive, doing so is painless).

So yes, I recommend it, it gives great peace of mind.

Does Windows cope with drive letters etc when you suddenly boot from an image of the boot drive on another drive ?

* the only thing I've ever seen that has an issue when you boot from a clone of a Mac drive is DropBox, you have to reconnect DropBox when you've booted from a clone