how I ultimately reconciled my accounts

My work email is my real appleID. I had a me account that I used for email forwarding, calendar, address book.
I tried having 2 for about 30 minutes today and hated it. So I let iCloud set up a new one for me (thank God it's not horrible) and then I migrated everything off the old one to the new one. Took a few hours, but the mail app on my laptop helped.

So now I have an appleID with a me.com email address inside of it.

Every single purchase (thank God) was under my work email aka my "real" appleID. I just set up the me.com address a year or so ago when I got fed up with google.
I never actually used the address.

My only remaining question is how to convince the new iCloud mail app to let me use my work email as the reply to/from address like mobileME allowed. Cant quite figure it out.