Ya I tried it on my note and its working just fine. Dont't worry about it, I was a beginner as well. I read that the only ROM's that were safe for NOTE are the gingerbread ROM's. If you flash an ICS ROM, then you wont be able to factory reset or anything like that as there is a great chance for you NOTE to brick.
And about the updating part - After you finish the above steps, you'll be on gingerbread. So just update your phone manually. For me, samsung(My Phone) asked me to update so I kept on doing that until I was from gingerbread to ICS(there are like 3-4 updates in between). I was also asked to update that "7 Mb" file(after installing ICS), which led to this problem of hanging on the samsung logo. Dont do that update. After updating to ICS, turn off the automatic software update option. You'll know that you are on ICS as it is a big update of >300mb.
I also emailed samsung about the situation and all they told me was to see the samsung store so ya, it just better to do it my way.
Hope this helps!!! Good Luck guys!!! (oh ya... You need a windows pc, I have done mine on a mac but I have a windows 7 partition which i find quite useful sometimes)