Report on upgrade progress:

Tarballs unpacked right on top of running system, and reboot worked fine.

New 1.6.2 kernel builds and works (with mods).  Everything went very smoothly.

etcupdate is very helpful, though a tad cryptic to use.  (I had
to copy off the files as I went to make sure what I *thought* it
was doing was actually what it *was* doing)

/etc/postinstall does almost nothing unless /usr/src is present and populated.
I went through by hand and removed the obsolete files.

Thanks again to the NetBSD folks for putting out a great OS.

-dgl-