To address the "what if I had tried to take off" question somewhat..
I had an aeroplane with a 9 cylinder radial engine. I flew it across the US from Virginia to Wisconsin with never even a hint of an issue. When it went in for inspection shortly thereafter, it was found to have 1 cylinder virtually no compression and one cylinder with a low compression, so it was running on 7 and a half cylinders, basically. Showed no different indications and sounded no different.
But thats a 9 cylinder engine and I'm guessing your plane is a 4 cylinder?
Equally, our Cub came out of annual last year, we went to go flying in it, sounded slightly odd taxiing out, just a slight hint of being different but nothing definite. Tried to do a run up, but the RPM wouldn't go above about 1100, no matter where we put the throttle. Taxiied back, had a look under the cowl and found all the spark plugs on the left side had not been reconnected...duh! Taxiing was fine, with only low power required. Even with a Cub, it would have taken a v e r y long runway to get off the ground with the power the engine could produce..
