I can definately see the attraction of doing it how line pilots do it day to day, so hopefully this helps. In real life, nobody that I have ever flown with has ever put a height and speed at a destination VOR or Aerodrome Reference Point in order to get an approximation of their TOD. In general, (at my airline, others will be different) the pilots have an idea of what arrival they will get and put that in the FMC in anticipation of the clearance, then, when they have recieved the clearance from ATC, they conduct a thorough briefing with about 80nm until TOD. Ideally the briefing would be complete with 20 or 30 nm left until TOD and then a PA can be made telling the pax what the destination wx is etc.
as far as setting up on the ground goes, most will do all the things you have stated but in addition will put their departure and destination airfields in the fix page with a 25nm ring around them. This is to provide a terrain clearance awareness should there be an emergency on departure or arrival. They will brief the minimum terrain clearance height within 25nm. They also make sure the enroute and descent winds are loaded and are similar to the flight planned winds. This can have a big effect on fuel used etc.