= On-Board: Disk Utility and DMG's =
I wouldn't see a problem in creating a Hard-Drive Disk-Image from within Disk Utility and have that as an emergency solution. This is because OS X itself, instead of Windows, isn't really bound to the hardware it was installed / configured to run on. It holds all the necessary drivers for all the Macs it's designed to run on.
To do that, you have to boot into either the OS X installer from for example an USB-Stick, or the rescue partition / downloadable RAM-disk, which is shipped / enabled on relatively new Macs.
After that you can open Disk Utility from the Utilities-Menu, select your Hard-Drive Partition (typically called "Macintosh HD") and then click on "New Image". Save it to an appropriate location, but keep in mind: You are not on your main OS X installation, therefor drive-names & paths might be swapped.
The process of creating the image could take a while, but after that you have an rescue-image you could use incase of a malicious program or hard-drive failure.
= The all-rounder: Homebrew =
Now the, in my opinion, more elegant solution. Write yourself a little Terminal-Script, which installs "homebrew" (a nice Command-Line package manager for OS X) and "homebrew cask", a utility for homebrew which installs GUI- (normal OS X applications), and then, finally, all the applications you wish to have on your Mac(s).
This has huge advantages over the first method, as the then installed software will always be up-to-date and can be updated with a command as simple as "brew update; brew upgrade".
= A word about Time-Machine =
Additionally, I would strongly advise you to use Time Machine, as it provides a very good solution to recover lost data in case of an hardware-failure. System-files and programs are backed-up too. It can be used solely or in a combination of one the two other methods.
= Summary =
If you are interested into this "homebrew"-thing, I could write a shot article about how to write such a Terminal-Script.
The built in backup application is only good for saving documents or pictures - not saving applications and their configs in the event of total failure.
This is completely wrong. Time Machine creates a complete backup of the system and every configuration file and you can use it to restore the system to any point of time that you have a backup for.