This is cool. Mac OS X is really moving away from dependence on having an optical drive or any other external. I have and SSD instead of optical and it's a nightmare to disk first aid or re-install os x.
"network connection required" is still an external to me. I guess also that it's going to require a wired network connection - or have they really incorporated a wifi detect-select-and-password system into the internet recovery version?
While it's convenient for certain unusual situations, I'd rather have a USB stick than internet recovery, simply for speed reasons.
