Distributing software on a USB Flash drive w/HFS Format - Legal???

We're considering distributing some of our software products on USB Flash drives. The rationale for this wasn't so much the recent moves by Apple to not bother including optical drives on some of their units (like the new Mac Mini and the Macbook Air) but rather the fact the R/W optical drives seem to have extraordinarilly high failure rates, and that seems to be a characteristic of them regardless of manufacturer. If I recall correctly, the lifespan of the lasers in R/W drives, especially DVD types, seems to be fairly short.

In any case, we'd like to do the following:

1. Format a USB Flash drive w/an HFS+ format, probably case sensitive.

2. Copy our product onto the USB drive. It would NOT contain any Apple or OS X components

3. Distribute the product like that.

It occurred to us that the very format (HFS) of the drive may be proprietary and require us to license this from Apple, which of course means more money and would likely be cost prohibitive. Most USB Flash drives are formatted in a MS-DOS FAT type file system or work alike. Our product will install and work off of that, but it seems sort of embarrassing and unprofessional to present a product to users on a FAT based system....it's sort of like say the Yugo and Trabant were the highest quality cars ever made.

Does anyone out there know if distributing a product like this is legal? We've sent a few e-mails to Apple's legal department and all we get back are "canned" answers saying someone may or may not respond to us, and no one has.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help.