Originally Posted by emusan

No, I don't believe that it does remove the OTA update, though I doubt there will be many if any more of those, and the worst that could happen is doing the OTA update would remove the root, however you could always just re-root the device afterwards(I doubt we will get anything past 2.2 in the near future, so rooting and re-rooting should stay pretty easy for now).

And yes, using the golden update file will restore the device completely, removing all data, including your root, meaning the device will be the same software wise as the day you got it.