Unfortunately I know this first hand. We were working on a customer's SharePoint instance and had to uninstall a feature. So using stsadm we went to uninstall the feature and forgot to include the feature part of the command. So we ran stsadm -o uninstall........... and uninstall it did! It completely uninstalled SharePoint from the server with no prompt or warning! The only thing left was the configuration wizard and the IIS websites were stopped.

I reran the configuration wizard and received error after error. So I went to Add/Remove programs and completely uninstalled SharePoint and reinstalled it. When running the config wizard I tried connecting to the same farm and recieved the same errors. So instead I went ahead and created a new farm and the install ran fine.

Once in the new Central Admin, I reconfigured everything, added the features back in using stsadm and viola, we're back in business...

Microsoft, please remove this awesome feature, it's too cool for us little people!