It is useful but it's proprietary and could possibly leverage their own backup drives. Personally, I prefer the explanation that it's there to drive users to create backups. Maybe because Apple knows how reliable HFS+ is ;)
I think skore's point is right though: reminding users to make backups is the lesser evil.
I actually meant both - You CAN consider it the lesser evil while it also has the nice side effect of clearing the market (for simple backup in OSX) from competition as early as possible.
Sorry, should have clarified - Marketing in the sense of: converting people into using an apple solution early, so they won't use one from another vendor later on.
I have no numbers to back me, but my impression is the vast majority of OS X users can't be bothered with doing backups even with a built-in Backup solution, much less a 3rd party one.
Time Machine isn't going to stop someone who places value on doing proper backups from doing them, and if it makes it easy enough for my mom do back up her files, then that's a net win — not marketing.
And hey, it only took me reminding her 5 times before she got the external drive and set up Time Machine — no family tech support involved.
The central problem with backups is that no one makes them but everyone should, without a question. That’s an attempt to solve that problem, even going so far as to purposefully annoy people! (Remember, everything is a trade-off and usually you will never be able to make everyone always happy.) This dialog box is the furthest thing from a marketing gimmick I can imagine. It’s comically far removed from that. (And, I think, exactly the right move. Yeah, people who know about backups already probably will not use Time Machine – but for everyone else that is pretty great!)
Would you dare an (unverifiable) guess at the percentage of people who plugged in a USB drive to copy some files and were enlightened to use it as a backup unit by the Time Machine dialog?
If I had to, gun to the head, I'd say that no one ever was.
I seem to remember that Windows pops up a baloon in the system tray every once in a while nagging you to configure the system for regular backups. That seems much more sensible.
