Yes, after the dd you have to run parted to adjust the partition table and then possibly use some other tool to grow the filesystem.

If the new volume is smaller (which it almost always is when switching to a SSD), you'd need to shrink the filesystem before you block-copied it with dd.

Indeed. Without this, though, I think his system still would have booted. Incremental progress is certainly better than wasting two days pressing buttons in a GUI, at least IMHO. (Once the system boots, you can worry about using the extra bits on the disk.)

partimage was the tool you were looking for. It natively understands NTFS, FAT, extX, Reiser, XFS, etc. and can resize as it images.

By default it pops up a somewhat annoying ncurses interface, but it's quite a solid tool.