I just ran across this while looking at the new Core 2 Duo processors on Dell PC's. Dell calls it Dell Data Safe and provides either a separate partition or separate RAID-like hard drive with Ghost 10 image and Ghost 10 software.

Dell Data Safe

Rad, yes, Ghost 10 (or some other image backup solution) should be on every PC.

Ghost4me, Dell says, however, that it's a 90-day trial version only:  "90-day trial version of Norton Ghost 10 is included with most Dell Dimension & XPS PC’s."  I assume the user needs to pay a fee to continue to use Ghost 10 after the trial period has expired.

I think there's a good and bad side to this story:

I recently helped a customer with a new Dell laptop (not the XPS line).  On the laptop is a separate "recovery partition", much like Dell used to provide (using CTRL-F11 at boot if I remember correctly).  

This time it is still there but (the bad side) the option came up about installing/activating Ghost 10 to support it.  From that I concluded that to restore from their "recovery partition" you will need to purchase Ghost 10.  For me that is fine, but if I interpret this correctly, customers used to be able to recover at no cost, now there is a cost.

Also, I don't know about the Recovery CD, whether there is an iso image there to burn or not.

I was impressed that, at least for their top line technology using the XPS model pc's, Dell is providing a separate RAID-1 mirrored hard drive, and then Ghost 10 on top of that.   That's more creative than I have seen from any other off the shelf PC.