HD Swap on Macbook Pro - Questions

I have a Macbook Pro (late '08- early '09), unibody 2.53 C2D, 4 gigs ram and a 320 gig hard drive @5400 RPM.
I'm looking into getting THIS Seagate 750GB 7200 RPM Hard drive to replace my current hard drive with.

The questions I have are as follows:

First and foremost: Is this a decent drive as far as reliability goes?

Also of concern: How does it work when you replace your OS HD in a laptop? I've never done this before, but obviously I would have to re-install everything. But what do I expect when I pop the drive in and start up the computer? Will it say something like "Insert Snow Leopard Disc" or something so that I will install the OS on it?

I'll probably also get the 6-GB ram upgrade kit too. Hopefully these two additions will speed things up somewhat (not that they're ridiculously slow).

Any and all help is appreciated.

1. All hard drives are good today.
2. All hard drives will fail eventually. Have a good backup in place, such as Time Machine.

For the installation, it is best to put the new hard drive in a USB2 enclosure (they're only about $10) and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old drive to the new one. Then boot from the new drive by holding the Option key when you turn on your computer. This brings up bootable volumes and you use the arrow keys to highlight the new drive, then press Return to start the boot. If it boots successfully you can then proceed with the hard drive swap because you know you have a good boot drive.

I used Super Duper to make a backup to an external drive. Install the new drive. Re-boot holding down the option key. Select the external drive. Run Super Duper from the external drive and have it restore everything on the external drive to the new one. I use Seagate's Go Flex external drives with the Firewire adapter. Makes backing up and restore much faster.

Well I want to do a clean install, not just a clone of my current, cluttered drive. It seems it's getting slower due to clutter. I've done one clean install in the past and it sped up the computer significantly.
Thanks for the help!

By "clutter" do you mean files that you need to delete? OS X runs disk optimization in the background during idle.

Yeah, it's just a bunch of stuff that gets built up over time, un-important files that get installed from downloading apps and miscellaneous photos and more. I like to start fresh every so often.