Even if you weren't going to build a complete scene in Blender, you can see how Blender can help with things like mapping textures onto objects and it doing accurate reflections.

Since the angle isn't straight on the object, a simple copying and flipping would NOT create an accurate reflection and no one would be fooled.

Here is a simple texture made in Xara, pulled right into Blender and mapped onto a sphere (with multiplication/mirroring of the texture) and a ground surface with a little bit of reflectivity. You can see that the reflection is not the same (image) as the object, since the views are from two different perspectives. (relative to the object) In the reflection, you're seeing the object from below, so the perspective of the object is from the FLOOR for the reflection, but from the camera for the object.

Click image for larger version.  Name: MappedFromXara.jpg  Views: 237  Size: 55.9 KB  ID: 83970

By the way, I'm excited that you want to learn Blender. You're an experimenting type, I think you'll have great fun with it and make some cool stuff as you get further into it. Cool!

Peace

James