At least in the default install, it is all one partition. Moreover, if you had disk encryption or something, getting the recovery keys would be a risk even you had followed all the right steps. Granted, none of these are good excuses for not doing TM backups since those are so easy. But just saying people could lose data and not have an easy way to recover it.
Well, I lost all my data. I have an empty relocated items dir on my desktop.
Edit: there's a Configuration dir in Recovered Items which has two other dirs, a private dir which contains another etc dir which contains a shells default file. Nothing else.
