There were a couple of people who were close, but no one hit it on the nose, so here is what I did:

First you snag the firewire cable from the iSight and connect one end to the broken drive lappy, and the other end to the not-so-broken drive lappy.  Then you restart the broken drive lappy in firewire target disk mode; once the HD of broken lappy pops up on no-so-broken lappy you launch System Prefs and use the Startup Disk chooser to choose the HD loaded via firewire.  You then reboot the no-so-broken lappy and that's it.

Once the not-so-broken lappy boots, it will pick up where the install left off, in this case asking for disk 2 of the install media.  There you have it.  Oh and for the questions regarding my sanity for deploying a machine with a dead CD-ROM, that machine would be running an Excel spreadsheet, and nothing else.  Didn't need a CD-ROM for that.