No, Blackosx, you've not spoken out of turn. As a clueless noob thrashing about, I welcome any alternate views.
I guess I thought it would be easier to migrate this system than to start from scratch. If I am off base in this assumption, please let me know.
Here's one of the wild cards - I don't really have a backup of this system. Migration Assistant has failed me in this area. Running it not only rendered this particular disk unbootable*, but went so far as to make the destination disk's filesystem unusable and unrepairable. You may want to read the second clause of that last sentence twice. Unrepairable, as in Disk Utility > Repair Disk says that it fixes invalid file volume count and invalid volume directory count --- but than an immediate rerun of verify disk finds the exact same problems. Yes, after several hours of 2nd level Apple TS, it was baffling them too. Long story short, I was unable to migrate all the stuff I want to keep from the iPC hack to the MBP.
*(I have since found that Migration Assistant explicitly writes to the source disk. Seems stupid to me, but then again, Steve's richer than I -- so who am I to argue?)
Accordingly, I need to preserve some of the data currently on the iPC hack boot & system disk.
cpu-x reports SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 EM64T
While I consider myself a hack noob, I am fairly well-versed in the PC boot process in general. As an example, about a decade ago, it was your truly that discovered that Win XP on NTFS's insistence on a known volume serial number in the 'code' area of the MBR was what broke Ranish Partition Manager at the rollout of XP Beta.
So with these additional considerations known, do you have a course of action you would suggest? Is there any way I can do an 'upgrade retail install' over my current iPC, and end up with a usable system?