Time Machine restore fails to boot

I'm totally disappointed in Time Machine.

I swapped the internal drive of my MBP and used the Leopard install disk to do a Restore From Backup. The first time it just plain failed. Then I reformatted the new internal drive again (both times making sure it is a GUID partition), and tried again. When I tried again it restored everything from the TM backup, but then it would never boot from the restored drive. It would just constantly cycle in a boot sequence -- showing the spinner for a minute & restarting, over and over. Finally I just cloned my original drive using CCC.

My Time Machine backups have always included everything on my boot disk, Pretty pathetic that it fails to do a restore. What would I have done if my original drive suffered catastrophic failure? Now I need to look into a backup solution that works.

 

If you don't exclude anything in TM preferences it maintains snapshots of your entire drive at various time points (every hour for past day, every day for past month, every week earlier than that)