You would have to make your own recovery discs, from within Vista itself. Best Buy would probably just take your laptop, make the recovery discs, and charge you $100 for something you could have made with 2 $1.50 DVD's.
I say, why not try Vista out? Uninstall the crapware they put on the machine, and then give it a try. You might be surprised at how well vista actually is, if you don't go into it with pre-conceived notions that its a failure. Ask many people on this forum that run Vista, and they'll tell you that it runs great (Mak is a perfect example; 3GB (or is it 2GB?) of RAM, and a single-core Pentium 4, and it runs smooth on his machine).
Just putting in my 2 cents worth.