Hmm. Let's see.
mad-max supports, I think, my option 2. Perfectly valid, but not my favorite because you get one backup per backup drive (see answer to "image" backup). It sure is the fastest to get you back into business - plug in the clone and boot.
"Image backups" may take up a little less space, but the advantage for me is that I can fit multiple image backups on a single backup drive. You can only do one clone to a given drive, but with my teeny-tiny OS partition at 60 GB and my backup drive at 500 GB, I get quite a few versions on one backup drive. I hope that answers your question about the space taken by an image. Yes, images can be compressed and I've gotten some significant space savings, but for me it's all about getting eight images on one backup drive. If the latest one is an image of a flawed OS, with a bug or virus, I just restore the previous one.
Sorry that you had trouble with Ghost. I use EASEUS ToDo backup right now, it's free and it works. Until I had Win7 and an SSD, and had to worry about alignment and the hidden partition, I used Norton Ghost 8.0. I think that that is the 2003 version.
Yes, Windows comes with a (rather good) backup utility that can indeed make an image and restore an image that will be bootable. I have a strong personal preference for images made when the system is not running. This is probably historical; in earlier versions of Windows, full system backups made while the system was running might not boot if restored. At work I use Acronis True Image, making images from a live system, and I have used them for disaster recovery. I just feel more comfortable doing system-drive backups after booting to the backup utility from a floppy (yes), a CD, or my five-way-boot thumb drive.
To the question of which generations to trust, I've got so much storage space that I can go back at least a year. I also keep a log of installs between backups. It's not as troublesome as it sounds due to my habit of restoring the last backup before an install and backing up afterwards; the activity I have to log is in a small time period. But, I'm weird.
As to cloning the HDD to the new SSD when it arrives, if you read these forums everyone recommends a clean Win7 install. But if the drive is SATA you could do the install to it AS IF it were an SSD, following the SSD install guides on this site or others. Then you would have an SSD-tuned installation on the HDD which you could clone to the SSD. I don't see why it would not work.
Always install 7 with the installation drive being the only drive on the system, and the disk controller set to AHCI mode. Then see this:
http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-... .