Unfortunately, there is no way or an extremely difficult way to recover from a factory reset. I agree this is simply an irritating and useless feature.
EDIT: Try searching for "recover factory reset android." I got (sorry, cant post links)...
They should make it so that after 10 attempts you can't do ANYTHING with the phone until you click a link in your e-mail (not even BIOS). This would make stealing the phone useless and nothing too bad can happen by accident. What is the likelihood of someone stealing your phone and e-mail...