Upgrading my MacBook OS to Lion, Valuable advice from pros in need

You have to upgrade to Snow Leopard first...

 

Yes, your MacBook can handle Lion and no, it won't slow it down, and yes, you have to upgrade to Snow Leopard first, so you can access the Mac App Store to download Lion.

 

time machine and migration assistant.

 

Time machine / migration assistant won't revert the OS.

Going to Snow Leopard then to Lion is the only approved upgrade path.

 

I'd stop at Snow Leopard unless there is a need for Lion.

 

So would I, personally. But the OP asked about Lion.

I played with Lion on my MacBook.
Some things I liked, but some things I didn't.
I'll keep Snow Leopard as long as I can.

 

True ... when I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard I noticed a pretty good bump in speed. I guess I should say snapiness. My guess is from the removal of all the old PPC code?

I like Lion but there are no must-have features for me.

 

That was essentially the point of SL over Leopard. They weren't going for any fancy new features or anything like that, the goal was to rewrite code where necessary, strip out old, unused features, and essentially do everything they could to make it run faster.

 

Not necessarily...

I was in a similar position and I bought a Lion USB and instead of upgrading, I did a clean install. Costs the same as upgrading to SL and then Lion.

Make sure to use Time Machine or something similar to back everything up.

From all the posts about Lion on MR, it seems as if a clean install will help avoid a lot of little bugs.

Also, 4GB of RAM should be enough for everyday stuff, but if you can, it's definitely worth upgrading to 8GB, but that depends on what you do with your MacBook.