It's a brilliant system - the magic is genuinely in its simplicity, making it so much more likely that people will actually make use of it, without any setup required beyond, really, choosing which drive to use.

There is, or was, one nasty gotcha, however - when your HD's failing, and some files are becoming unreadable, Time Machine won't say anything. I don't know if that's still the case, as I encountered that a few years ago. So, you might wind up with a good copy in an older backup, or not, depending how long the problem's been lurking.

But yes, it's so easy to pluck out an older version, or indeed, perform a full restore onto a new drive (or indeed, new system, as I did from Dandelion to Hazel). It's also rather neat the way the same process continues even when the T.M. backup drive isn't available, such as when you're away with your MBP - it just keeps the deltas locally, and offloads them when it next sees the drive.