Yes and no. Depends on how we're defining recovery partitions. I actually think they are good because they restore you pc to working order without the monotony of installing all the drivers and etc.

However it also restores your pc to factory defaults which isn't very convenient. When I get home I will give you the name of the disk imaging program I use. It stores a very small (mine is about 5-7 gig in size) image of your boot drive and you can just use Bart PE to reimage your hard drive.