How many IT managers plan to use a USB version of Windows 7?

Assuming Microsoft uses a USB option for Windows 7, how many IT managers out there would go this route? Have any of you used USB as an option to deploy new software in your business? Using USB-bootable OSes? Please, share.

I have used Clonezilla Live on a USB drive. It can store drive images in compressed form, used-blocks-only, on the USB drive. Then I boot a PC from the USB drive and select the image to install. The process is faster than 100 mbits/s over the LAN and does not impact services on the LAN. The cloned system needs start-up scripts to give it a unique identity.

We will not be deploying "7" here because it will not run well on our old clients. We use GNU/Linux because it is faster than XP and very easy to manage using SSH. Clonezilla can also be run from a server and can broadcast for cloning many systems simultaneously but it has major impact on the LAN requiring down-time or after-hours work. The USB drive is very convenient because it works off-line at any time.

Our strategy is to replace our old units with thin clients when they die or convert them to thin client use by LTSP which relies on PXE to load a terminal image. This way, we get to run modern software using our old equipment and replacing dead system with new, inexpensive thin clients. One would need heavier-duty thin clients to be able to run a normal thick client OS on them from a USB drive. We find it more efficient to consolidate computing power on the server where the multi-core chips, huge RAM with ECC, RAID and gigabit/s networking are economically deployed.