Soory; that comment from the 14th of January did not get posted yet: I would not really like to have it on an USB stick unless it has a ROM (which could likely be too expensive). Having some read only media is to my mind an indispensable advantage especially when it comes to security. I do not like the ambition to phase out optical media just because downloads can be controlled more easily when it comes to copyright issues. Well, an USB stick with ROM would of course be a valuable alternative!
2014-01-20: … and for the very 'new' machines you still have to buy an USB2.0/3.0 BD/DVD drive. To me it is very important to have a look on where to buy new hardware because it should also support reading and writing the BIOS and as far as possible also the hdd firmware as it has increasingly become an attack vector; I personally would not buy anything than a coreboot supported machine, i.e. a computer with open source BIOS; and internal BD drive of course.
