>>Today's motherboards have lots of stuff in the BIOS. My latest has a graphical representation of itself and when you hover a mouse over things on it, it says what's plugged in that place - which processor, memory, USB device (not too smart there, mostly says "generic"), microphone etc. For flashing, it has the option to have a new BIOS on a flash drive (not sure if there's a pun in there, or whether it was intentional) and there's an option in the BIOS menu to load itself from a file on that drive (and to backup itself first). You'd be surprised how developed this has become.
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>Some enthusiast/gaming mobos have so-called dual BIOS. The idea being the user can mess around with settings (mainly overclocking), and if they configure something that won't POST or boot they can use a mobo button (or maybe keyboard combo at boot?) and revert to a saved, "known good" configuration.

My current motherboard has 8 save slots for such configurations - and you get to name them so you don't need to keep a piece of paper around.