Understand this is pretty early, but has anyone been able to find the mountain lion recovery disk assistant software that one can download onto a USB thumb drive ?
After you install Mountain Lion, you can use the Recovery Disk Assistant (in the Utilities folder) to make a bootable Mountain Lion recovery partition on a USB stick. The assistant still refers to Lion and has the Lion picture, but I have verified that it does work.
If it's not in your Utilities folder, just download this Lion version from Apple. It works with Mountain Lion too.