I'm another happy WHS user with its ability to schedule nightly backups from all our PCs.

Unfortunately, you cannot buy a preconfigured machine with the newest software version which is Windows Server 2012 Essentials R2 and setting that one up is non trivial and expensive. Windows 8 can be used as a server OS to save money over Essentials but will not pull the data from the client PCs for backup nor can you do "bare metal" restores of said client PCs without buying 3rd party software.