What they don’t tell you (this is Lion by the way, I never tried this with Snow Leopard):

When you restore from a Time Machine backup to a brand new drive, it doesn’t recreate the recovery partition. And then you can’t recreate the recovery partition. So unless you did a USB key recovery image beforehand (I did (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4848)), you will never be able to restore again.  Once the recovery partition is gone, you can’t use the above link to create a new USB recovery image, because it requires the recovery partition to be in place.