Now to finish up answering your question. I am working on an Orple MacBook Pro that has Snow Leopard currently installed on it, My customer wants to upgrade his hard drive to a larger unit, and I did not really feel like doing double work with an UpStall of Mountain lion on that drive then SuperDuper ng it to the new drive and what not. As he wants to erase the entire drive and start clean. That will not happen if I do an upgrade to his existing drive, disk image a backup to the new drive using it as an external then installing the drive into his Orple Mac Book Pro. If you are wondering what and Orple is, since Intel began supplying processors for the Mac's and they can now semi natively run Windows Orple is a word I derived from Oranges (PC-Intel) Ple is for (Mac OSX aka Darwin Unix) hence you have an Orple.
I did contact Apple care not to check up on your advise which by the way was down to the letter correct however they did say I would be able to take the download and make a USB or DVD image for backup purposes. But you are absolutely correct there is NO direct download for Mountain Lion and Apple will not even provide for a charge the OS on a USB stick as they did with Lion.
Thank you once again for your efforts, you are truly a lot more knowledgeable with this than I am, Although I learned on an old Mac 512 Stacker, and being in an office environment I kinda had to slide over to the PC side of the house for 20 years until I retired and started up HomeBrew.
Dev