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1. You can backup entire partition

2. Restoring of Windows machine with lot of software very annoying and takes a lot of time (clicking dumb "I agree", and reboot the computer now, entering serials etc...) but with ubuntu or os x it's less annoying experience. Good package manager calculate dependencies for software. The only exception is when you need to install some proprietary software (less frequently than on windows) or you need edge version.

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I have a shell script that installs all the packages I need on a fresh Ubuntu install, but

1. I only tend to update it after running it and finding that something I was expecting to be installed wasn't (really I should switch to using puppet/cdist/similar for this)

2. I have to set up Firefox manually (downloading extensions etc)

If you're scripting it anyway, you could go one step further and just download all the XPIs to your extension directory, where Firefox will automatically pick them up. I also believe Firefox Sync will be able to sync extensions in the future.

Put your Firefox profile in a Dropbox directory?

True, a partition restore would be faster.

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