If the OS is crapped up to the point where you need to recover, doesn’t usually mean that you also don’t have access to the Internet?

Ahh, but that’s just it: the recovery partition is its own, self-contained OS, that doesn’t inherit or share any settings with the main (presumably mucked-up) OS that you use day-to-day. SO, in theory, as long as your Internet connection itself is working, you should be good to go.

Actually, I misspoke. Internet Recovery and the Recovery Partition are two different things.

The Recovery Partition does what I described above and IS available on ALL Intel Macs running Lion. The thing is, Lion needs to have been installed on the hard drive once in order for the recovery partition to be built. If your entire hard drive is replaced, no recovery partition exists.

That’s where Internet Recovery comes into play: Internet Recovery allows the Mac to go straight to Apple’s servers and download Lion for you, etc., without *anything* ever having been installed on the drive that’s in there. My guess is that the EFI on older Macs might not be large enough to support this, but I don’t know that for sure. I’ll see if we can find out.