On an Intel based Mac: USB booting and cloning works exactly the same as Firewire.
On a PowerPC-based Mac, only a pretty limited set of systems can boot from USB, and they can only really easily do OS 9 from it. With some OF trickery, that i don't know off hand, you can boot OS X via USB, but it's not particularly fun or pretty.
It can't easily be done over a network. If you have a Mac OS X Server you can set up NetBoot, but another solution is what I do. Install OS X onto a big flash drive (and be ready to rebuild it from time to time because OS X will totally kill flash drives it's booted from) and then connect to a server, use CCC/SuperDuper to make a DMG file, store it on your file server.
On the deployee, boot OS X from the flash drive, connect to the file server, use CCC/SuperDuper to write the image out to the disk. It's the same as using a physical disk as a target, you just happen to be unable to boot a DMG from a network file server.
On a PowerPC-based Mac, only a pretty limited set of systems can boot from USB, and they can only really easily do OS 9 from it. With some OF trickery, that i don't know off hand, you can boot OS X via USB, but it's not particularly fun or pretty.
It can't easily be done over a network. If you have a Mac OS X Server you can set up NetBoot, but another solution is what I do. Install OS X onto a big flash drive (and be ready to rebuild it from time to time because OS X will totally kill flash drives it's booted from) and then connect to a server, use CCC/SuperDuper to make a DMG file, store it on your file server.
On the deployee, boot OS X from the flash drive, connect to the file server, use CCC/SuperDuper to write the image out to the disk. It's the same as using a physical disk as a target, you just happen to be unable to boot a DMG from a network file server.