Has anyone been able to do this whilst still keeping their 10.8 recovery partition?
And was anyone able to restore from Time Machine rather than do a re-install?
I downloaded 10.8.2 installation file again and created a USB out of it and started the process of creating FD, you won't be able to keep the old recovery partition as you need to destroy all partitions on all drives before proceeding with creating FD
Restoring from TM was really tricky but worked perfectly in my situation. I have MBP (early 2011), replaced my DVD with SSD last year. I had OS+Apps on SSD, Users home folders on HD. And this is how I got everything back to normal as expected, note that before creating FD, I had SSD named "Macintosh SSD" and HD as "Macintosh HD"
1) booted with 10.8.2 USB, deleted all partitions on all drives and created FD and named as "Macintosh HD"
2) Installed 10.8.2, connected my TM and proceeded with restoring, it only showed data from my SSD but not HD. So TM restored my apps and based usernames information (like logins, passwords).
3) Since I had 'root' account enabled my default, I logged in as root, under system preferences -> accounts & groups, I made sure that all users home folder path points to '/Users/xxx'
4) Having my TM connected, via finder I went under /Users and selected my username home folder, I entered TM and restored that user folder from latest backup.
5) That's it, all apps, data, preferences are back exactly as expected with FD