So Roy finally got his act together and picked up his upgrade DVD from uni.
Snatched it out of his hands even though it was 2am or something and shoved the disc into my powerbook.
I already had a cloned copy of my harddisk on an external drive waiting for the past week or so.
Did an erase and install, but a bit dismayed to learn that leopard takes up 11.7GB (still better than vista which needs 15GB).
Anyway, the file copying took forever, so left it on and watched some Family Guy and Kath and Kim.
Then the amazing part came, "Migration Assistant". It transferred absolutely everything I need from my cloned backup, such as user accounts, preferences, applications, downloaded files, other files and folders, mail, iphoto and my library of photos, itunes and my library of mp3s, wallpaper settings, safari bookmarks, etc.
After all that, Leopard starts up looking and feeling like my original desktop, only better. It's like I upgraded over Tiger, but with far less risks of "complications". So painless I'm really amazed.
Ta-dah!