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This is an incredibly naive way of backing up your system.

I use rsync to back up certain folders. I'm OK with re-installing Linux if my hard drive crashes.

It's not naive at all. There are a plethora of situations/reasons where one may want or need a block level image backup.

For example...

Well, it provides a perfect copy of the drive, not just a copy on another file system.

I've actually been able to restore to a drive, and when it boots its as though nothing ever happened. Plus its fast.

Its eerie to turn the computer on after knowing you formatted the drive for whatever reason, and your desktop pops up again.

It stops being eerie after a while. Several months ago, my brother was putting together a computer and wanted to test it (ie. the motherboard) before attaching any peripherals (other than the monitor). Obviously, installing the OS on the HD to do this was out of the question, so I just copied my computer onto a thumb-drive and used that. I didn't dd it, but just copied my filesystem over and did a grub-install.

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