HT4718 Can't access my EXISTING OSX 10.8.1 Recovery Partition

Question

This computer is a non-retina mid-2012 MacBook Pro.
Using DiskUtil in Terminal shows the correct disk configuration:
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:  GUID_partition_scheme                        *750.2 GB   disk0
   1:                               EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:            Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            749.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:            Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
However, booting up with Cmd-R just goes to the Internet Recovery, and booting up with Option Key shows 2 identical Macintosh HD icons - selecting either one boots the system regularly from the Macintosh HD; no Recovery Partition shows up.  I had two eligible computers and the first one was updated directly from the App Store; this one was done with a bootable USB drive.
35 years into the "microcomputer revolution" I really hope that someone can suggest a solution other than "reinstall the operating system."  Not that I don't appreciate help, but this should be fixable with a less drastic solution. The parition is there, something needs to be told to recognize it.  Also, I don't know that reinstalling will produce any different results, although reinstalling directly from the App Store might "turn on" whatever is "turned off."
Thank you.

Answer 1

This is completely normal. By booting OS X Recovery you are accessing the Recovery partition.
The Recovery partition is normally hidden, since it is intended to be for "emergency use only". As a longtime computer user, this may understandably annoy you, but there really is nothing you ought to do with it.
Reinstalling the OS won't help since it will just recreate the recovery partion, even if you reformat or completely replace the drive.
You may see suggestions from users from time to time to reinstall OS X. This scatter-shot approach is almost never justified on a Mac, since most problems are due to conflicting or poorly written third party software unrelated to the OS, and a reinstallation won't help.
Replacing a failed hard disk is one valid reason to reinstall OS X. It's difficult to come up with any others.
See the diskutil manpages to determine how to mount the recovery partition so that you may examine its contents (which are read-only). You'll then be able to get yourself into all sorts of trouble.
This excerpt from the Lion Ars Technica review may save you the time:
Doing so reveals the partition as a normal HFS+ volume. The top level contains a directory named com.apple.recovery.boot which in turn contains a few small files related to booting along with an invisible 430MB internally compressed disk image file named BaseSystem.dmg. Mount that disk image and you find a 1.52GB bootable Mac OS X volume containing Safari, most of the contents of the standard /Applications/Utilities folder (Disk Utility, Startup Disk, Terminal, etc.), plus a Mac OS X Lion installer application. In other words, it looks a lot like a standard Mac OS X installer DVD.
That was the idea - to eliminate the need for a system recovery DVD.
As you can see the recovery partition probably won't have much to interest you anyway.
To get a better impression of how all this works (N.B. the following is NOT for the faint-hearted):
Clone your system to an external volume
Boot from the external volume
Completely erase your internal HD, removing all existing partitions
Unplug your external volume and boot OS X Recovery
Reinstall OS X