OEM Pro, then upgrade or install Full Retail Ultimate 7 directly. W530.

Question

Hi.  I've calmed down a bit after the excitement of my first computer upgrade in a few years (went from T61p to W530).  Pretty happy with the W530.  In fact, very happy.  Wish Lenovo would have as much published info about the W530 as was offered for the T61p.  I think that info enhances the value of Lenovo's user's experience. Makes Lenovo a better value proposition.  Anyway...
I have the (legitmate) OEM Windows 7/64 Pro recovery disks for my W530.   I want Ultimate (because of Bitlocker, and a few other features that are nice).   I have the UItimate Install disks (w/ legitimate key), but they arent' Lenovo OEM disks.  Ideally, I'd  install the OEM version (which has all the drivers installed) of Pro, then would use the Ultimate disks to upgrade.   If that works, that's what I'll do.  Alternately, I could just load Ultimate directly, then load update manager 5, and update my drivers and such. 
The question is: is it ok (or even better) to load Ultimate directly, without the Lenovo OEM stuff?  Pluses, minuses?
If I can't use the full version key of ultimate to do an upgrade, I guess I can troll eBay for an upgrade key.  Can OEM versions be upgraded?
If it matters, the install is going onto a Samsung 850 Pro 500Gb SSD. 
Thanks!
Two W530s, i7-3820QM, 2.7Ghz, 500Gb Samsung 850 Pro, 1920x1080, nVidia K2000m/100m, Win 7 Pro
T510, M540, 2.53Ghz, 1Tb hybrid drive, Win 7 Pro
Two T61ps, T9500/T9300, 2.6GHz, 8Gb RAM, 256Gb Samsung 840 Evo, 1900x1200, nVidia 256Mb FX 570m, Win 7 Pro/Ultimate
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Answer 1

If you're not going to use the Lenovo-provided 3rd-party software products (which mostly are lite or trial versions that you need to pay for anyway if you really want to use them fully-featured), or if you already have your own collection of 3rd-party products (both free and non-free) that you would be installing after-the-fact and using anyway on your new W530 no matter how you got whichever Windows version installed (and thus you'd probably be UNINSTALLING any "bloatware" from your delivered W530 in any case), just do what you want if you have a retail Ultimate and you want to use it.
As a 2-year owner of a W530 (243852U, Win7 Pro x64, K1000M, 8GB memory) who 1 year ago replaced the original 500GB spinner with a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro and reinstalled "from scratch" using a retail Windows Pro x64 installation DVD rather than even considering using Lenovo's recovery media (which I never even kept in the first place!), my own feeling is that creating a "pure" self-installed Windows is amost always the way to start if you have a day or two... assuming you have a retail Windows installation DVD and your own collection of 3rd-party software products which characterize any machine setup that you build.
I already maintain my own manually maintained collection of latest up-to-date drivers and Lenovo system products for the W530, as I am periodically checking for any recent updates on their W530 driver download site and maintain my own local folder of all of these installer files anyway so using them all if I had to start over from scratch is not an issue. Actually, I also use more recent versions of drivers from Intel and nVidia than Lenovo provides.
In actuality, the ONLY piece of Lenovo-provided software I have SOMETIMES used is System Update installed on my machine.  This is actually a theoretically automated and accurate way of getting all latest drivers and other software needed by your own particular machine which have not already been obtained through standard Windows Updates anyway.  But in my experience the database referenced by System Update is not always up-to-date, and often lags somewhat from the actual W530 download site.
Bottom line: I could have my W530 totally devoid of ANY Lenovo-provided system utilities and it would not affect me, but then that's just me.  I certainly have not used ANY of the Lenovo-provided 3rd-party software products, as I have my own collection of fully-licensed products that mostly all get installed onto all of my machines (desktop or laptop).
Bottom bottom line: swapping a hard drive spinner for an SSD doesn't normally justify reinstalling Windows.  There's no licensing reason to reinstall (i.e. a new hard drive/SSD is an allowable upgrade to continue using the same instlaled Windows with the same license key).  So you can just use one of many products to "clone" your existing partition(s) to your new drive (e.g. Macrium Reflect, Minitool Partition Wizard, even the Samsung-provided cloninig software, etc.).  Or, if both drives aren't available simultaneously you can just do a 2-step equivalent, by taking a "system image backup" of the existing environment out to an external USB 3.0 backup drive, then swap internal drives, and then do a "system image restore" from the external backup drive to the newly installed internal hard drive.  Of course if you really wanted a new version of Windows (e.g. Ultimate, in your case), then a reinstall from scratch is the course you must take since I don't think OEM licenses for a given Windows can be upgraded (but I may be wrong).
NOTE 1: even if you were to just clone your current spinner-based Windows onto the SSD, avoiding the Ultimate install for now, you'd still want to run Samsung Magician to "optimize/tweak" Windows for SSD performance since it had originally been installed as intended for spinner performance. There are some additional tweaks you should probably look at to get the most out of SSD.  And Samsung Magician provides (a) rapid mode, and (b) over-provisioning, for still more SSD performance.
NOTE 2: Lenovo also provides a "driver grabber/updater" set of utilities for System Admins, which is like System Update but more under your control and is intended to maintain a folder of drivers/utilities (exactly as I do myself manually, without any assistance from the Lenovo software).  But again, it's based on the same database that System Update works off of, so even it can lag behind what's actually available directly on the Lenovo W530 driver download site.
Sorry if this is providing unnecessary information to you.  But I've gone through several such spinner->SSD upgrades, or in the case of several M93p desktop machine configurations for friends and family, have ADD'ed an SSD as a second drive (to become the primary boot/system drive), retaining the original Lenovo-provided spinner but repurposing it to become a secondary data drive.
In the case of these M93p situations, I opted to "quickly and easily just clone" the existing Lenovo installed Win7 from spinner to SSD, and avoid having to reinstall Windows from scratch onto the SSD (also avoiding Windows and driver updates, reinstall of 3rd-party software and Windows customizations, etc.).  In the case of my own W530, I instead opted to reinstall from scratch onto the newly installed SSD, using the opportunity of the hardware upgrade to truly "build my own Windows" and not have any leftover pieces from Lenovo other than what I chose to manually reinstall myself.