Unless your laptop has a SATA 3 HDD interface, I would suggest that you save your money and buy a 7200RPM conventional HDD - the performance gain with an SSD on SATA 2* isn't worth the extra cost. Yes to SSD on SATA 3, definitely.
Of course there are other reasons for SSD - less susceptible to shock damage, quieter and cooler, so if these are important then fine.
The disk cloning software that comes with HDDs is generally OK - Acronis worked OK for me recently, but the best I've come across was Samsung's own utility, which was an absolute doddle to use with one of their SSDs. I've not had any issues with cloning to SSD when using reasonably recent versions of cloning software - no special precautions / steps required at all.
I would recommend getting a USB caddy to put the new drive in so that you can connect the new disk to the PC for the clone operation - you can then put the old disk in it as a portable USB disk. Worked very well for me when cloning the disk on my Lenovo laptop recently.
HTH
SD
* note particularly that Lenovo crippled the SATA 2 interface to run at half-speed on the T61, so you are actually limited to max 1.5Gbps - an SSD would be truly wasted in this situation. You can buy a equivalent size 7.2K drive for 1/3 - 1/2 the SSD price, or spend the same money and get a much bigger disk.