It doesn't matter what the OS recognizes as far as drives, even during the install process - it will see everything it has drivers for. But the BIOS is responsible for loading the boot-loader from the first few sectors of disk, putting it into RAM, and running it (which then continues to read the rest of the OS from wherever it wants and run said OS) - so the BIOS is what needs to support your thumbdrive if you want to boot from it. It's easy to hit Del during post and check your board - if it supports it then this discussion doesn't really matter much as you have your solution.
If it doesn't support it (which I consider more likely), I personally like the Floppy-drive idea I posted above. I didn't mean to unplug it while the system is live, thats likely to fry something. It won't be a "true" diskless system this way, but it will appear that way to anyone that sees it. You leave the floppy in the drive 24/7 and just stash the drive completly inside the case and put a cover over the front. The floppy is only ever read from to load the OS and after that doesn't even need to be accessable from the OS (eg. if running linux you don't need to mount it anywhere) - it will never be used while the machine is actually running. You can even leave the floppy write-protected once you put the boot image on it if you wanted to. There are a few linux distributions designed to be used this way, which is where I got the idea from. Google should be able to find you some examples, if I remember right the distribution I am thinking of that does this is called something along the lines of Linux Router Project - they wanted to build linux routers/firewalls/home network sharing boxes/etc. without needing HD's in them.
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