does this include application data?
When my wife upgraded her iPhone a year ago, iTunes did a "restore from backup" and her new phone was then (an hour or two later) set up exactly like her previous one, including all applications and their data, saved games, in progress games, options, settings, the lot.
Full backup (of data of applications that don't sync with online services) can be done on the SD card, which can then be moved to another phone. Not as nice as if it were all done online, but it works for now.
Slightly related, I wish Android would stop using the SIM card's internal memory. Just import the information on there when a new card is detected and forget about it from there on. I had to fiddle for half an hour to get my wife's data from her SIM card into the normal Android contacts. Half of that was because the UI to do so isn't very obvious. (most of the other part was sorting out the duplicates).
You can go to the store today and buy a new Android phone and when you put in your Google Voice credentials, it will have all of your text messages with their read status. There is no reason a USB cable and laptop need to be involved in that process.