I have made a standard usb stick installation boot and run OK from my PC.
The USB drive was slow and rather old so there were pauses between issuing commands and things happening.
But it did work. A faster usb drive should work a lot better I think.
If you would try the Debian live idea, I guess you would install the file that is usually burned on to the DVD on to the flash drive.
Then you need to figure out how to get the bios to boot from it as you would in a conventional USB installation.
Regards
Michael Fothergill