Boy I don't want to get back into this much. I know what opinions are like. Here is my take on this. You have to be able to boot from something. Therefore creating a hard drive image on an external hard drive and creating a boot cd seem to be the way to go. You cannot boot to a new hard drive with no operating system.
If you wish to clone..then by all means clone. I will tell you that updating an image is about the easiest thing in the world to do. Restoring a new hard drive from that image is also easy. I do not get all the debate. In my mind imaging is the only way to go for a laptop and Cloning will work well for a desktop with a second internal hard drive installed. Have fun you all.