Not the solid state drive after all
It turns out that the problem with the best’s macbook is not its interaction with the SSD, but it’s interaction with all internal media. After attempting to restore on friday it failed to reboot but just locked up on a spinny cursor instead. And after several slow iterations of fetching the internet recovery image and failing to get it to do anything except throw an error and force a (slow) reboot I looked around more on the net and found discussions of faulty hardware cables, with the diagnostic being to install the offending drive in a sata ↔ usb sled and try to boot off it.
So I tried that. And it worked (booted and everything) and let me recover off the time machine backup and update to macos 10.9 without any fuss.
Too bad the cable is a $50 part :-(