correct, a battery pull is necessary and then the phone will boot as normal. I've ensured root, re-done the root steps just for good measure, and have redownloaded/reinstalled both ROM Manager and the Bootstrapper. have always hit bootstrap recovery button first as well. I've known my phone doesn't like warm reboots, which is something I've been anxiously waiting for the update for, but I've recently decided to test out the Fission ROM.
weirdly enough, it took about 6 reboot attempts (yes, I was persistent/stubborn lol) for it to finally boot into recovery.