Question about Lion/Mountain Lion installation on a new Mac

How is Lion/Mountain Lion installed on brand new Macs? Is it freshly installed from scratch or are they done by way of upgrade like when you buy it from the app store? Thanks.

When I got my new Macbook Pro (with Lion already installed), I purchased a 16GB USB Flash Thumb Drive, than used SuperDuper (or was it Carbon Copy Cloner) to copy the mostly original contents of the new Macbook Pro to the USB Thumb Drive.  And because I'm the paranod type when it comes to backups, I did it again, on a SD Card and did it again.
I also used the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to put a recovery partition on a few external devices (including the USB Thumb Drive and the SD Card), so I have multiple ways to recover Lion should something go "Bump in the Night".
As to how Apple gets the OS on the disk, my guess is that at the factory they clone a master image onto the disk using a very fast sector by sector copy or a utility similar to SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner (but most likely something of Apple's creation).

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    Jon Kevin wrote:
    I am a very brand new Mac user. So anyway, when I point to the apple and click on "About This Mac", it says the operating system is, "OS X Version 10.8.2. The question, is this "Mountain Lion", or is that additional software I need to download?
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    No, and yes.

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    No comment at this stage.

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    reviews.cnet.com/.../how-to-install-front-row-on-os-x-lion - Cached
    More results from reviews.cnet.com »
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