A system snapshot for a personal computer is potentially a really difficult thing to restore (ex. you break the device and need a new one, unless it matches exactly restoring snapshot likely puts you in OS recovery mode).
While I am sure the process has limitations, I think that modern Windows has some amount of flexibility there, because due to a defect I've recently had to swap out my mainboard + CPU, and the system booted up just fine. The most major issue was that with the default drivers Windows had reverted to, the Ethernet controller didn't work, which could have been a little bit of a Catch-22 (no internet without the correct drivers, and no correct drivers without internet), but in practice I just downloaded the drivers on a different device and transferred them over via USB.
Yeah, plug and play drivers are much better today than years ago, they're also still challenging in many situations.
For someone with your technical skill level it's very manageable, most folks don't know what a mainboard is.
To an average user it's much easier to work with restoring their My Documents (and if they need full system state have Parallels save VMs under that folder path).
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While I am sure the process has limitations, I think that modern Windows has some amount of flexibility there, because due to a defect I've recently had to swap out my mainboard + CPU, and the system booted up just fine. The most major issue was that with the default drivers Windows had reverted to, the Ethernet controller didn't work, which could have been a little bit of a Catch-22 (no internet without the correct drivers, and no correct drivers without internet), but in practice I just downloaded the drivers on a different device and transferred them over via USB.
Yeah, plug and play drivers are much better today than years ago, they're also still challenging in many situations.
For someone with your technical skill level it's very manageable, most folks don't know what a mainboard is.
To an average user it's much easier to work with restoring their My Documents (and if they need full system state have Parallels save VMs under that folder path).