What tool are you imaging with, and what kind of images are you taking?

Since we're in the "Norton Ghost" consumer backup forum, let's assume you're using that kind of backup product. In that case, you don't really need to use Sysprep because the restores will generally take you back to a close point in time (before the machine account passwords in the domain have changed) and you'll generally be restoring to similar hardware.

If you're talking about a deployment product like real Ghost (aka Ghost Solution Suite), you don't need to use Sysprep either, since there are alternatives for most of what it does, and most people with the need to use it will be able to use volume OS licenses.

The one really useful thing that Sysprep does do for smaller setups (and which isn't taken care of in GSS) is to help you install different Windows product keys, at the cost of having to maintain custom Sysprep files for each machine. For that, you may want to have Sysprep in your environment.

If you're using one of the Ghost Solution Suite 2.x versions there's a brief walkthrough of creating a simple Sysprep.inf for Windows XP here, which GSS will edit for you so that Sysprep should integrate smoothly into the console deployment process.