Time Machine and equivalent of System Restore?

Question

For years Microsoft have had (and needed) a feature called "System Restore" which lets you uninstall operating system updates that may have caused problems.
I had hoped that Time Machine would also provide this capability since uninstalling Apple updates is not really possible. I cannot see any obvious way of doing this. For example, based on the fact that to undelete an email you have to have Mail at the foreground before activating Time Machine I thought it might be logical that if Time Machine can uninstall Apple Updates you would need to first have the Software Update preference pane open. This does not work.
Has anyone else found a way to do this?
While the rest of Time Machine (for undeleting files etc.) is wonderful, a way of rolling back Apple updates (or anyones updates) would be very helpful as well.

Answer 1

AxL wrote:
Yes but +"any changes to any file on the system (mail, photos, documents, etc) would be lost"+ only temporarily.
They are all still on the TM backup, and you can restore them using the TM interface, and there's even an option to recreate a folder that doesn't exist anymore
(better say "that was not yet existing"...)
in the same location or in any other chosen location.
No data loss.
I have since my original post found that booting from the Leopard DVD and selecting restore from Time Machine lets you browse backups to restore from, and that it lists the version of Mac OS X for each. This would make it easy to select 10.5 if hypothetically reverting from 10.5.1 but it also suggests that hypothetically reverting from QuickTime 7.3 would be much harder since all you would have to go on would be a date/time. For this maybe the log in Software Update would be helpful.
Your answer (thanks for it) however does resolve the worry I had about such a restore also reverting user data. Now that you have pointed it out one can of course then do a second restore when back up and running just of the user data.
I would have to say though that this is not an elegant user friendly solution to this particular issue and thus not up to the standards one expects from Apple. Imagine if you are doing this on a machine with multiple user accounts (not unlikely for a home machine). You could also theoretically encounter a situation where you do an Apple update, create a new user, create data, need to remove the Apple update, have to restore the entire machine via Time Machine, and thus lose the user account, and therefore not be able to login to restore the user data. Potentially even if you recreate the user account, it may not have the same exact UID or UIDnumber and thus make restored data inaccessible (users are forgetful and you do not have control over the UIDnumber used).
I still think a more friendly approach would be for the Software Update preference machine to be "Time Machined" like Apple Mail and iPhoto have been so that if you are in Software Update and activate Time Machine it will let you just revert an update without affecting user data.