Moving photos from one media to another?

Question

Lets say you have a laptop that you do all your Lightroom work on. By default you import the RAW images to the local disk, manipulate (develop) them, and the convert them for use elsewhere.
In the mean time these RAW photos start to collect on your disk and you want to move them to an "off-line" media. Say a hard drive (or multiple) in USB enclosures. Ideally when you move them they retain all of their metadata, keywords/tags, develop settings, etc. Not to mention have their standard previews and other data available for viewing.
If I read the Adobe FAQ on their suggestion on how to do this, the implication is you can move things off line, but you'll lose stuff like keywords etc. In many ways it seems to be saying you're removing them from Lightroom, rather than putting them on "near-line" storage. That really doesn't do the trick for me.
It looks like maybe I can copy the physical folder to the new hard drive, remove it from the old, then tell Lightroom to "Find missing folder". I'm not sure if that preserves keywords etc. (I need to test), but it certainly is tedious if you have a lot of folders to move (I break up my imports by date, so they collect fast). "Find missing folder" is very slow when you go to open "My Computer" by the way (perhaps it's specific to my laptop though).
Ideally there really ought to be a way to highlight a folder in the "Navigator" pane, right click on it, and select "Move to another location". Maybe there is way to do this, that just isn't documented (or I haven't found in the documentation).
Alternatively I could create a "Catalog", but that wouldn't be searchable from the old catalog (plus they don't clearly say if you should delete the stuff under the old catalog exported to the new one, which I find kind of confusing in the documentation).
Am I missing something? It seems a bit half baked - critically so such that even though much of the library functionality is there, there isn't quite enough to do the job so the rest is pointless. Having used other products like iMatch, it's hard to take the very limited functionality.
There is of course plenty else to use in Lightroom, but I'd also like to use the photo management for a single comprehensive application. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be quite there.

Answer 1

I usually create a new library on my laptop, and when I am done editing, I transfer it lock stock and barrel to my Desktop, where I'll do more editing and whatever conversions are needed. [Then I convert to DNG, not necessary].
Why don't you try a few this way? You can leave the catalogs separate on your laptop, and separate or included in your main desktop catalog (or both if you're careful) . All key words, etc. should come along with the imported catalog.