Oh yeah...sorry, didn't catch the username!
Yeah, there are definitely slight differences between HTC and Samsung, but they are pretty similar. One nice thing about Samsung is ODIN, which makes it easy to flash factory images from your computer. Either way, if you've modified the stock recovery and installed CWM or TWRP, OTA updates are going to fail.
I agree with you about the purpose of unlocked bootloader.
As I mentioned, the idea of having the unlocked bootloader sounds great, but that's why I pointed out that the standard version doesn't have an unlocked bootloader at all, but there was a way found to get a custom recovery on it and flash ROMs, but only if devs build the ROMs using a tool that was released (Loki), to make the ROM compatible. If I were buying the dev edition, I'd be worried that it may be actually hindrance to installing ROMs. Maybe not...just something to look into...?