Reading over (and then testing out on a test database) the setup for mirroring it appears that one is supposed to leave the mirror database in restoration mode for normal operations.
is this correct? at whatever point it becomes necessary to initiate the failover (im not using a witness), will the primary database be put into restoration mode? this seems goofy.
Yes, mirroring is where transactions are replicated from primary to mirror. So one database will be in restoration mode
Perhaps a read of 2 whitepapers may assist One and Two
If you have Enterprise Edition, you can create database snapshots of the mirror, and report off these. But these are point-in-time, and read-only. You need to manually implement some way of rolling them over regularly (creating a new one and deleting the oldest etc), and you must devise some way of redirecting the clients to the new snapshot.
Readable mirrors are coming in SQL 11.