Just a quick post to document some problems and successes.
SD cards: Even though I bought a preloaded 4GB SD card, after I got a little comfortable with the Pi I wanted to try to load one myself. I bought a good quality 16GB card and downloaded Berryboot, unzipped, and copied to the SD card. I popped it into the Pi and powered up. My PC monitor has a slot for an external HDMI so I could watch the boot process, but I didn't have a USB keyboard or mouse so I couldn't do anything with it. So the next day I borrowed the keyboard and mouse and off we went. When i originally booted with the preloaded card, I didn't need the keyboard and mouse since it comes with SSH enabled and after finding the IP address I could just open a PuTTY terminal session from my PC. Berryboot was pretty easy to set up but I encountered a few error messages in the process of using raspi-config. I have a widescreen HD monitor and I couldn't get the configuration to yield outputs that weren't off screen on the left side. Enabling and disabling overscan didn't have any effect. At this point I don't see a need for multiple boot OS options, I'll be working Debian (Raspian) and I want the boot to allow me to I immediately open a SSH PuTTY session so I abandoned the Berryboot route. That meant I needed to reformat and reload the SD card. This time I downloaded and used the SD card formatter and the New Out Of The Box (NOOB) software load from the Raspberry Pi site. Following their instructions everything worked like a charm! Unless you are going to be heavy into development and need different operating systems on a single SD card, I highly recommend sticking to the NOOB load and instructions. After inserting and booting the new card, I completed the process by using $ sudo apt-get install tightvncserver to allow a remote graphical session. Finally, I followed some instructions from "How to Make a Arduino+Raspberry Pi Robot Platform by cbrittain1 on June 18, 2013" on "Instructables, Let's Make Robots" (a great source!) to setup several useful software elements.
Battery power: I happen to have a rechargeable (LiPo) battery with 4 USB ports for powering multiple devices. I use it all the time when traveling to charge my iPhone and iPad. You can use it plugged in so that it recharges while charging devices and it has a power switch. So this seemed perfect to use with the Pi. Each USB output can deliver up to 2.1A at 5V up to to a total of 2.5A and it's ~8000mAH. I tried it out without having it plugged in and it provided perfect power for the Pi for several hours. The fact that it has multiple USB ports means I can use it to power the Arduino simultaneously when I get to that point. The battery I have is from iSound and while it's not cheap (~$60) and it's not tiny, I think it'll be fine for the robot power until I find a smaller solution.
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