I haven't used a floppy for a while now. I have installed XP and Win2k on SATA without needing special drivers. On some mobos, I needed to play around with the BIOS setup before it would see the SATA drives. Neither of the SATA computers I built have floppy drives.
I agree with raggie about floppies, but it might be easier for most people to have a floppy drive, although it can be added later if necessary.
When I need to boot from something other than the hard drive, I boot from CD. But there's a trick to that. If the software is available as a CD image, I create the bootable CD with Nero. Other CD writer programs can do this also.
If the software isn't available as a CD image, then I put it on a floppy and make a bootable CD using floppy emulation. I don't use a real floppy drive with real floppies though. You can download a virtual floppy drive from the internet. It costs nothing, and it takes up no space inside the computer case. You don't have to open the case to install it, it requires no cables, and you can format it in one second. The only thing you can't do with a virtual floppy is boot from it, but you can make a bootable CD from it.