dd is fine when "cloning" a drive to another, especially when the drive is the same size/model and what not

when you go to migrate say to a bigger drive or to a smaller drive is when dd starts to lose its usefulness or when you have to clone many machines at the same time, networked applications work much better

there is still no "ghost" solution that i have found, but partimage is close enough and works fairly well

if you are just going disk to disk and size changes are not an issue then yea dd is the way to go