@davidfor: Thanks for the info! It's reassuring to have some outside confirmation that the root and user partitions are wiped as part of a factory reset. Guess I'll try getting in touch with kobo support to send it in.
It would be so amazing if we had a means of booting into some type of recovery image. It's a shame they didn't include the internal microSD slot like in some of their other models...
(On a side note, is anyone aware of any teardowns of the KA1? The only one I've seen is
/kobo-aura-one-comics-pdfs-guts-video/ (original sauce is in Italian), which at least gives some idea of the KA1's internals, but it would be cool if there was a more detailed/hi-res teardown. (Still, gotta give props to the guy who decided to do a teardown on day one.)