Restoring with Lion

Hello, all.

My father recently passed away, and he left me his computer. I currently own a 13” MacBook Pro, and my dad’s computer is a 15” MacBook Pro, both of which are recent releases and both run Lion. I would like to restore the hard drive on the 15” to factory settings, yet retain Lion. I read about the Recovery feature on Lion (holding Command+R during system restart to access Disc Utility). If I were to erase the hard drive on the 15” this way, would Lion stay on the drive?

I want to use the 15” as a new computer, but still be able to access my files from my old computer’s Time Machine backup. Is it possible to browse and download files from another computer’s backup?

So to be clear, my goals are to:
-Restore the hard drive on the 15” to factory default yet retain the Lion OS.
-Access the files from my 13” MBP’s backups while using the new 15” MBP.

Any help would be awesome!

 

In Disc Utility, should I “restore” or “erase” the hard drive? Both sound right to me...