Depends on what you mean by easily. Few devices with spinning rust in can survive being dropped 3' onto a concrete floor, iPads and mobile phones are even more fragile. My old one had a bit missing from its "Indestructible" gorilla glass but still worked. My wife had someone drop an iPad destroying it beyond economic repair.
Potentially. We took to putting telltales into the shipping package after one damaged machine came back with clear evidence that it had stood upside down in 12" of salty water long enough for mild steel parts to go rusty. That pretty much clinched who was at fault (it was the sort of kit that is shipped in air floatation supports "this way up!").
Most spectacular one to repair we ever had was when they dropped one from the cargo bay door of a 747. It was never the same again.
Absolutely. I had a strict policy of no support for existing work until my bills were paid. Some of the large companies I worked for as an employee and then later as a contractor would only pay their bigger bills when someone from the bailiffs turned up to take the fax machine away. I knew their systems and MO so I made damn sure that I got paid on time and in full.
Why not continue to use the partition method and keep this option as a backup. I suspect the USB stick will get reused though. You could perhaps make all the important files invisible to naive end users.
I can see it could be complex if the installed based is inhomogenous.
I find it hard to work out what to do for the best under these tricky constraints. I've done some voluntary work for organisations where everything had to be chained down to the desks to prevent snatch thieves but never anything quite so complicated.
I can see why you need to lock things down.
There are too many videos of how to format a write protected USB drive for you to stand much chance of preventing it. Use cheap nasty small ones would be the best idea that I can come up with. Ones that are too small to have any resale value.
Another simple option would be a write once CD and then you could include images for a few different machines on one disk. That way any copy of the right CD will do to make a trashed machine work again.
Or even the micro CDs that come with drivers on.