The big [really HUGE] problem with Ghost these days is that you have to re-Ghost every time Microsoft posts a critical update.
Sometimes that's only once a month, but often it's once a week.
Not saying that you shouldn't Ghost, it's just that Ghosting is a helluva lot more work than it used to be.
And you can't automate Ghosting [vis-a-vis Critical Updates], because you need to play around with the new Critical Update for a while to see whether or not it broke anything important on your system [some of them will kill your video drivers, some will kill your disk drivers, some will kill your USB drivers - which is hell on wheels if you've got a USB keyboard and/or a USB mouse], and to decide whether or not you want to commit to the Critical Update permanently, or whether you want to un-install it and role your system back to a previous state.
Again, not at all fun for the professional [although it does put food on the table], but potentially overwhelming [in complexity, tediousness, and time consumption] for the amateur.
At work I use Ghost Enterprise for our clients. It has update options and you can ghost over the network to as many simultaneous clients as your bandwidth will allow from ghostcast servers. Your remarks about updates hosing up OSs can be a nightmare! We have a couple of test boxes we use to make sure updates won't break anything, then we release them to our SUS server to go to the clients. Even then, sometimes updates will cause problems.