Question : Macintosh recovery to dissimilar hardware

I need a good backup strategy to backup my customers' mac systems but I come from the pc world so my experience in recovering macs is minimal. I use symantec backup exec system recovery to write a backup image to a usb or network drive.  
Now if system hardware fails or I want to go back to last Wed's backup image (incremental), I can pop a CD into dissimilar hardware, boot from it, connect to my storage, and perform a hardware independent restore. All programs, settings, data, and apps are restored to that point in time, even to a different hardware. A laptop image will go on a pc, or a server image can be recovered to a laptop, also to virtual machine.

I'm told that all I need to do for a mac is copy the volume to an external device, usb or firewire, and boot up while holding alt-x to select a different boot volume. Is there a way to take a copy of a drive to a different

Answer : Macintosh recovery to dissimilar hardware

The way to do bare metal recovery to a different (and presumably newer) Mac is to install a bare system on the new Mac from a system DVD, then use Migration Assistant to copy back the settings, documents and applications from the cloned drive:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3322