I think you've misunderstood what I said, ChicagoCarless, so let me try again.
We're pretty carefully tailoring ourselves to the needs of the consumer, and are hardly ignorant of their needs. We're not forcing you to plug a wired hard drive into your wireless laptop.
On the contrary: you can back up to a network share. You just need to do so by backing up to a sparse image, which ensures that your ownership and permissions are exactly as they are on the source.
This works quite well, doesn't require you to install any kind of agent on your destination, and even works with NAS devices (like the various Buffalo and Infrant units) while still maintaining a fully Mac-compatible, native drive format.
What we *don't* allow is backing up
from a network share. But the other way around -- which is exactly what most people (including you, it sounds like) are doing -- works just fine, as long as you store to a sparse image, as explained in the User's Guide.
So, no cables, no hindrances, and no Windows, unless you want to back up to a Windows box. That's up to you, of course: we certainly wouldn't tell you to.
