Hi luke: Yes I know how you feel. I felt thesame way when those forst imacs came out with no floppy disk drives and with a read-only optical one. But now you can't find floppies anywhere xo life goes on.
In any case you can, at least, make your own recovery disk. I did it and it works just fine. Here's a set of directions that I followed that I copied from some poster (sorry but I lost the originator so can't give him credit).
•. Purchase and download Lion from the Mac App Store on any Lion compatible Mac running Snow Leopard.
•. Right click on “Mac OS X Lion” installer and choose the option to “Show Package Contents.”
•. Inside the Contents folder that appears you will find a SharedSupport folder and inside the SharedSupport folder you will find the “InstallESD.dmg.” This is the Lion boot disc image we have all been waiting for.
•. Copy “InstallESD.dmg” to another folder like the Desktop.
•. Launch Disk Utility and click the burn button.
•. Select the copied “InstallESD.dmg” as the image to burn, insert a standard sized 4.7 GB DVD, and wait for your new Lion Boot Disc to come out toasty hot.
It is important that you burn your Lion boot disc or backup the Lion installer prior to installing Lion itself. If left in the Applications folder the installer will be removed after the Lion installation is completed. If you are reading this article after upgrading to Lion all is not lost. A fresh copy of the Lion installer can always be redownloaded from the Mac App Store by clicking on the Purchased tab with the Option key held down.
With the Lion boot disc you can boot any Lion compatible Mac, and install 10.7 just like you installed previous versions of Mac OS X. You can even use Disk Utility's Restore function to image your Lion boot disc image onto a external drive suitable for performing a clean install on a optical-drive-less MacBook Air, or Mac mini. Clean installs with Lion are easy once you find where Apple has hidden the boot disk.
Hope this is useful to you.
Rick