Yeah, I love that about the Mac. Coming from an entirely PC background (by ignorance only), the feature that first wooed me to the Mac platform was the ability to pull a drive out of any machine, pop it in any other machine, and watch it boot. You just didn't see that on a PC. And the newly booted Mac had full hardware support, all the applications ran just as they did on the old machine, and it wasn't wildly unstable. Sheer bliss for someone tired of spending all his time reinstalling Windows on a host of machines. Of course, we lost all that in OS X (the biggest reason I objected to the switch at first), but I think it was overall a fair tradeoff.

For future reference, all you should need to make a bootable CD is to drop a (blessed) system folder from a setup disk onto a CD. The system folders from Apple's original install CDs can be transferred to any custom burned CD, as well as those on the setup or disk tools floppies/images. I keep "tech CDs" for every major system version handy, containing SSW installers, crucial upgrades, and repair tools. I liked to keep an empty ~690 MB partition on my CD burning Mac that I could install all the software on, test it if necessary, and burn the entire partition to a CD. If you don't have that luxury, Toast's temporary partitions are an excellent choice. Disk images and/or temporary partitions are the easiest way to keep the disc bootable once you burn it without a hassle.