In fairness to Symantec, the basic Ghost code is pretty solid, and if you search on past postings by Nigel Bree (one of the ghost developers), you can see what he has to say about what went into the code.
Ghost does a number of things, including working with builds that are being sysprepped and with the DeployAnywhere technology, enables you to handle the different driver requirements of the machine inventory you find in the average company.
Microsoft release a new version of WinPE alongside new operating system releases, so V2, the version in Ghost, was the version released for Vista, and WinPE V3 was released along with Windows 7 and Windows 2008R2 server. There is a significant difference in the way WinPE V2 and V3 function, and although work had been started to implement WinPE V3 for Ghost 3, that work was shelved when the development team was laid off. Having said that, the Ghost product manager has posted that a new version of Ghost may appear in the next few months, so hopefully it will be updated to cover Win 8 as well as updating the version of WinPE being used (and it will be interesting to see if WinPE V4 appears anytime soon now that Windows 8 has shipped to the end user market.)
With manufacturers continually bringing out new chipsets both for network support and for SATA drive support, it would be a challenge for any vendor to keep the driver library up to date. The strategy adopted by many of the ghost users in this forum, is to identify the chipset being used in any new hardware, and then seek the appropriate drivers from the chipset vendor's website. It is worth searching this forum on the chipset number as users often post links to drivers they have found which work with WinPE V2. An example is the Intel 82579 chipset which has proved particularly challenging to find working drivers for, but our members have posted more than one link to working sources.
There are also many articles on Connect which can help you with various aspects of setting up and using Ghost. This remains an enterprise-strength product with many capabilities so it does require a little more work than the average "retail" product which is not intended for doing more than backing up one or two machines.
On a separate note, are you aware that Microsoft offer the "Windows Automated Installation Kit" or WAIK, for Windows 7, which is their toolset for creating scripted Windows 7 installs. The WAIK includes the source for WinPE, and the articles I referenced in my previous posting points you at the appropriate WAIK downloads for V2 and V3. WinPE also comes with "ImageX" which creates WIM images, rather than GHO images, but they are not unlike Ghost in offering you imaging solutions, albeit free of charge. The downside is that the integration of drivers and creation of build scripts is something you have to do for yourself, and it is quite a steep learning curve.
Do come back and ask us if you have any further questions, as Win 7 imaging creates a few more challenges than older operating systems such as XP. If you are unfamiliar with BCDEDIT, you may want to research this with Google as this utility is important if you change the partition structure of your target systems. Win XP used boot.ini to identify the boot partitions and to provide support for dual boot systems, but this method is no longer used with Win 7 and has been replaced with the BCD editor.