How to create a bootable clone?

Question

So, I'm returning after a while in Mac-land, and there's one thing I'm missing that the Mac got very right. There were several apps that would easily clone your system onto a backup disk and make it bootable. It was the best backup system I ever had. If my disk died, I just rebooted onto the other one, and when I got the replacement, I used basically the same process to do the restore.
How can I accomplish this in Arch? The "dd the disk" method isn't going to work out to well, as I need support for disks of different sizes, partition layouts, and interfaces. Rsync seems promising, but there's a fair bit of work to do after the copy since things like FS UUIDs will be different.
The way this works on Mac is basically like this:
1. rsync the source to the destination, excluding a few things that are useless, as recommended by Apple.
2. Make the clone bootable. This is easy on Mac as boot code is never written outside the root FS, and doesn't even need to be installed into the FS header - all that has to happen is that the inode number of the boot code is written to a specific spot in the HFS+ header.
3. The Mac's firmware (either PPC OpenBoot or X86 EFI) will scan all attached disks for bootable filesystems and show a list for you to pick, when interrupted with the right key.
4. The root FS is always the boot FS, which eliminates the need for configuring the root FS in the boot code on fstab. It just mounts whatever it booted from as root. This neatly eliminates the need to post-edit these files after a clone
As I see it, the difficulty of automating this process in Linux really has a lot to do with the lameness of the PC BIOS.
I don't want to roll my own cloning code. Backups are too important to trust it to the kind of dirty hack I'd come up with. What can I use?

Answer 1

So, I feel I have to respond somehow to this, so as not to seem ungrateful for the nice responses, but none of these answer the question I actually have. I think the typical Arch-user's DIY attitude goes a bit too far, sometimes.
I know how to copy the files over, how to change the UUIDs, how to install GRUB, and how to create the 3 magic device nodes (null, console, and zero, for future reference). Just about any of these suggestions would be fine for a one-time or once-in-a-while process, but I want something that's painless enough to use as a daily backup routine. There's also the problem that they don't handle well the case where I don't want to take over the entire backup disk, and especially don't handle odd cases such as GPT disk format, where you shouldn't install boot code into the partition table area. They also aren't designed for the case where the backup device is an external disk which isn't intended to be remounted internally when disaster strikes, or the case of laptops where you don't want to have to remove /dev/sda from your machine to test.
Basically, it amazes me that apparently nobody has written software yet to automate what's probably a very common desire. Google didn't find anything of the sort, so I came here to ask actual human beings. (Yet another case where Google is not wrong )
Where I'm at now is to rsync everything and create the 3 device nodes, and then stop. This gets me to the 90% mark, is simple enough to be foolproof, and makes restoring the same as backing up. If there's no professional-feeling way to do the rest, I'll stop there.
None of this post is intended sarcastically, and please don't take offense at my laundry-list of complaints for the suggestions given. I think my posts could stand to be a little clearer if a paid sysadmin with 11 years of Linux background can gather responses that say things like "use cp" and "DONT USE THIS COMMAND UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING"