Im not a huge fan of apple products. however i do need to interact with them, and a couple of really amazing things i have found are below
http://refit.sourceforge.net/
rEFIt is amazing, it is an EFI boot an enhancement that allows you a truly dynamic boot process so if you need to boot to CD it will find it and give you an option to boot there. Today i used it to do a windows 7 install into an empty partition. no bootcamp!
also amazing is Carbon Copy Cloner
http://www.bombich.com/
if you have someplace to put it it makes a copy of your mac install, if its a physical drive or partition it is a bootable install. so if you do anything development like you can save your original in a bootable state and then horribly wreck your install and come back to something usable.
the combination of these tools was able to give me 2 OSX partitions, one i can destroy if needed and a windows 7 install and a nice boot menu to switch tot he one i want.
