Intel Macs can boot from USB drives

Last week Dan posted about the new complications of Intel OS X drives not being bootable on PowerPC Macs, and vice-versa. The report came from Jon 'Wolf' Rentzsch, who recently updated the originating post with some specifics about booting and partition schemes, with one fairly positive detail: Intel based Macs can boot from USB2 drives.

While many in the Mac community prefer FireWire over USB2 for various reasons, this will nevertheless open the doors for OS X to be bootable from more external hard drives. What are the chances I can bring a slimmed down OS X installation along with me on a 2 or 4 GB USB2 flash drive? I guess a geek can dream.