No Wake-On-LAN for powered-down Macs?

Question

I'm relatively new to Mac and don't have a lot of Mac experience or knowledge. Last week I completed the "Mac OS X Deployment v10.4" training in Sydney where the trainer told me that Wake-On-LAN will only work if the Mac in question is in sleep mode -i.e., you can't wake up a Mac that has been shut down. Is this really true?
As an administrator of Windows machines this seems like quite a shortcoming. From where I am sitting I can rebuild any room of computers in any town in my area of control (an area greater than 100,000 square kilometres in NSW, Australia) without having to be there physically to turn on the PCs. At the moment our two Mac rooms are located at my own site, but without Wake-On-LAN, there's no way I could see Macs being deployed anywhere else.
If Wake-On-LAN really does only work with Macs in Sleep mode, then how much power does a 20" Intel iMac draw when in Sleep mode? I really don't like the idea of setting a schedule for every Mac to turn on at a certain time then have them go into sleep mode each and every day on the off chance that I might want to rebuild just one of them. This seems like an awful waste of power to me.
Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not trying to flame because I'm very - very - impressed with Mac in almost every other respect (except the Finder and the Dock) and would switch to Mac long before I stomach Vista, but no Wake-On-LAN to me seems like an incredible stumbling block to Mac adoption.
Intel iMac 20"   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

I've already complained of Mac's variation from the "standard" WOL implementation. This problem goes a step deeper as I just discovered.
If in the energy saver options you check the "Restart after a power failure event", the machine will do just that. If the power fails, and then comes back, the machine will boot.
If however, you cleanly shut down the machine, and then power fails, it does not turn back on when the power recovers. All PC's that have auto-power on with AC power restored set in their bios don't care if the machine was cleanly shutdown or crashed... when power comes back, it boots.
The problem here is that when a UPS detects a power failure and eventually decides to shut down the attached computer it should do so cleanly, not by just crashing it (that defeats the purpose of having a UPS!). After the computer turns off, the UPS will turn itself off, cutting power to the computer all together. When the AC power to the UPS returns, and the batteries charge sufficiently, it will turn BACK on, and restore power to the computers.
As it stands now, I have no mechanism by which to force my Mac to boot back up! I could depend on a linux machine on the network (that does behave properly) to send a WOL packet, but it doesn't do that correctly either... so I'm SOL
I can understand having 3 options for reboot after power restore. (1. Restore Always, 2. Restore when system on and power fails, 3. Never Restore).
Only giving us options 2 and 3 is just an oversight of how computers are used in the real world. For the desktop user that may on rare occasion find his machine powered off, and just presses the power button, this is a non issue... But in my opinion this completely eliminates a Mac like this from being used as a webserver/mailserver or other application where uptime is paramount.
I can't believe that Apple would overlook something so important and not provide a mechanism by which a UPS could turn a computer back on after a power recovery. Perhaps there is a non-published setting that doesn't have a check box on a form, that an OEM UPS driver would set that says "pretend you crashed".