Upgrade Successful!

Upgrade Update: It took about an hour to complete the hard drive clone and swap out from start to finish.

Pictured here is the laptop drive connected to the MacBook Pro
using the SATA to USB cable.  

After about 40 minutes running SuperDuper to clone my drive, I spent the next 15 minutes hunting down a screwdriver that could open the tiny screws on the bottom of the unibody. Opening up the laptop further confirmed the high quality build. It was also easy to locate the drive and perform the swap. I then screwed on the back and powered up the MBP.

What a cinch! End result seems fine, though I can't really tell much of a performance difference with the new drive. However, I can definitely tell it is louder. Good 'ol Seagate. (The drive that came bundled was a Toshiba).

The next step was upgrading Snow Leopard to Lion:

Lion upgraded without any issues. Checked a few of the apps and everything seems to be working great. Now I'm going through the application updates.

Lastly, from a PC perspective, as compared to what I would normally go through on upgrades, I think this one went quite smoothly. The software did its job and didn't require any extra foolishness like booting from the CD because Windows keeps the files locked (which would have been the case on a PC, per the instructions).  I did have to do some minor partitioning with the disk utility on Mac, but that was also quite easy and straightforward  similar to Windows 7.  Not bad!