Just for any other users reading this, and became concerned because of all of the horror stories, I successfully updated my device to 4.5 without any problems.
Simply followed the OP's instructions exactly, and resulted in a painless and relatively quick updating. Only additional step I would add is after the initial completion of the updating, I did a battery pull to refresh my BB. Before the battery pull, my applications loaded a bit slowly, but now it's as fast as pre-update.