The internet recovery is new with Lion. Initially it only worked on new Mac's but they've definitely added it to the Macbook Pro's that were launched at the beginning of 2011. Not sure about other older Mac's. There is still a hidden recovery partition that it will restore from but if that's fucked (or you've installed a new blank hard drive) then it falls back to recovering via the internet.
Is that using the option key on boot or something? I'm genuinely curious, because surely if the OS is fucked, how does it connect and what not?
I've not long bought a new Macbook Pro, although it's running Snow Leopard, so if I find the balls to move to what I hear is a worse OS, it sounds like a nice feature. (Although saying that I've never had any OS problems, so I can't imagine when I'd need it. Still, it's a nice shiny gimmick!)