Inodes 0 and 1 have special and historical meanings which may or may not be valid for your filesystem. But because of this, inode 2 is always used for the root of the filesystem so that it's consistent.
Inode 0: deleted files/directories, some systems use it to point the the inodes, some don't use it at all, system dependent.
Inode 1: bad blocks, file system creation time, etc... again it's very fs dependent.
It's not for storing a backup of the superblock or anything else like that. It's just two reserved data structures which have special purposes for the file-system. What exactly is dependent on the file-system itself.
Edit: The man-page fs(5) (in FreeBSD) says the following about why they stick with the number 2 for the root.
Code:
The root inode is the root of the file system. Inode 0 cannot be used
for normal purposes and historically bad blocks were linked to inode 1,
thus the root inode is 2 (inode 1 is no longer used for this purpose,
however numerous dump tapes make this assumption, so we are stuck with
it).