All the systems I have seen come through our place of business have typically nagged one to create the disk if they were not shipped with the machine.
Business machines are a different kettle of fish, though. I know my wife's (personal, non-corporate) laptop didn't nag. And the past two machines I've owned I bought from my employers after they'd already been in use for a couple of years, and so any nagging was done before I'd ever seen the machine.
When I have needed to look up proper use of a system recovery partition I can usually find he info on the support site of the vendor or in their support forums.
When I am swapping out hardware, I know I'm swapping out hardware, and I prepare for the task ahead of time. I know to look up instructions for that particular component.
When you (generic, not you personally) are looking at a laptop mostly dead under a virus or malware load, and you are not an IT professional, you don't know what instructions to look up. It isn't as if most folks actually know the phrase "recovery partition", and that it should be looked up in such situations.
When you're looking at a laptop that's mostly dead, you may not be *able* too look up solutions. My wife's machine had no functional browser while affected.
It is hard to write directions for removing a virus.
Partially true, but mostly false.
It is hard (probably impossible) to write static instructions that will cover all possible scenarios. That I'll grant you is true.
But really, EricNoah gave me a solution in a few sentences. So, we've got empirical evidence that you're incorrect.
If your support organization is geared to actually helping end users (as opposed to IT professionals), you can provide suggestions for procedures and applications in a similar vein, and probably cover the majority of user needs.
