Booting for the masses

I need to setup a system and procedure to image 1000’s of Macs, both Intel and non-Intel across the country. Creating the image or package and delivering it is only part of the process which I have been researching. More often then not, the support person or user that receives the image is not going to have the original startup disks that came with the Mac so what do they boot-up with? More often then not, the support person or user will have little to no Mac knowledge so the process has to be simple. I was going to first create one of those nifty dual boot disks but you can only put them on a firewire drive and not a flash drive because a PowerPC based Mac won’t boot to a USB drive. Firewire drives are too expensive to be sending them out by the 100’s. From what I’ve read about net booting it’s not robust enough unless you had many servers across the country. I have done this before for 150 users in one location but this time they will be coast to coast, 1000’s of users and I won’t be preforming the task. Any suggestions would be very welcome! Thanks!