And, if you work with confidential information, just about any issue would make these machines disposable (even within warranty) if your organization is unable to remove the drive containing said confidential information before sending the unit in for repair.
They appear to have removed that port for this revision.
I'm pretty sure it can, just that the methods are (currently) beyond the reach of DIYers.
Besides, there's probably easier ways... like tapping into the decrypted data. Like any classic DRM scheme, if you have the key and the algorithm, you can get the content. That does not make it easy, but it can certainly be done with enough effort.
That would be very huge news worth many millions of dollars as it's the critical piece of iOS device security.
Once, with one brand, in 2010. And it took 9 months.
When I went to the Genius Bar because my laptop had WiFi issues, they didn't boot from the internal hard drive, they booted from an external unit that seemed to do way more than just function as a USB-external-HD.
If they mean "self-service" recovery, then I don't know that a soldered hard drive is any different from a removable one. It either works or it doesn't, if it does you can recover from a recovery partition... if it doesn't then you can't recover no matter what.