In the case of the Asus machines, they come with a recovery DVD. If you buy a Windows version, it’s got Windows XP on it, if you buy a Linux version, it’s got Xanderos on it. It will reformat and imprint the same image you had when you bought the machine, takes about 8 minutes from booting off the external to finishing the imprint on Linux, about twice as long with Windows (why it uses Windows to imprint the image, I don’t get, but that’s what it does.. Norton Ghost...)
I can’t imagine that other manufactures do that differently, but one has to be aware that SSD drives do have a failure rate. Because it re-maps the drive to spread use over the whole silicon drive, to balance use and to prolong it’s lifetime, normal recovery processes (such as recovering the MBR) won’t work on them, as where we /think/ the MBR is, could be anywhere on the physical chip rather than the expected address.
Just don’t lose that DVD, it’s highly important if things go south on you. :)
How do you use the DVD with no optical drive?