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You should have a little icon in your tray that looks like a card with a green arrow near it. If you right-click or double-click it, it should give you an option to "stop" certain connected devices. The reader will most likely show up as a USB Mass Storage device of some kind (unless you've installed a special driver that might make it display a proper name).
I've unplugged usb storage devices dozens of times without remembering (or without being able to, do to system unresponsiveness) to properly disconnect them, and never has it resulted in corrupting a whole file system. So I wouldn't say it's "absolutely essential" in the literal sense, but it's true that you will run a small risk of some corruption if you don't--most often in the form of missing or incomplete files, but anything is possible.
Interestingly, the only time I had a file system go corrupt was after I properly disconnected an external firewire hard drive. None of the disk utility software that came with OS X could deal with the problem, and I had to purchase a third party disk repair utility. Luckily, I was able to recover all my data. Stranger still is that the drive has been stable since then, but that doesn't mean I trust it one-tenth as far as I can throw it (could probably throw it pretty far), so I'm using it only to transport data. (if it gives up the ghost, I'll only lose a transit-copy)
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