Windows system image backups with "physical" disks backing the storage (either locally-attached disks or via iSCSI) is actually reasonably nice. On later versions of Windows you can encrypt the backup with Bitlocker. Mounting prior backup generations via command line tools isn't too hateful. Bare metal restores of the entire system are very straightforward, too.

Using a network location is somewhat less useful. You lose Volume Shadow Copy so it becomes a single generation full-backup-every-time solution. It's still easy to mount and to restore from, but marginally more useless.

It would figure that Microsoft announced (last year, I believe) that the feature is no longer being developed.