Forgot to mention I actually was on the phone with Nest support to double check it would work for me, because I had indeed read the same horror stories.
Support tech was really knowledgable, and verified that if I measured a good AC voltage potential between the two wires that I would be good to go. Grabbed my $5 multi-meter, and measured 28V AC between R and W wires without anything connected. The Nest only draws a few miliAmps, which you could replicate with a variable resistor (potentiometer) to find out at what Ohm level the heater kicks in. That felt like too much work for me, so I just went ahead with the Amazon order.
When it arrived I simply secured the R+W wires with shrinkwrap to feed them through the Nest wallplate without having to pop the breaker; followed by inserting each wire into the Nest backplate, and clicking on the Nest unit itself into the backplate. Display came to live, and I immediatly began to configure it for WiFi/etc.
Inside Vera UI7 -- via the Nest app/plugin -- I can monitor the Nest thermostat battery level in an easy way, and it usually hovered between 85% and 98% during the initial week of messing about. I did forget to check battery level right after unboxing, so by the time I had Vera app configured the battery was already at 100% (possibly already was). Keep in mind that the reason battery dropped so low to 85%, was because I am using an aggressive 60 second poll timer value to update status, and was constantly changing/verifying settings via the LCD display on the Nest (as well as via browser/Vera).
With things settled in now, and relying more on Vera scene control versus manually rotating that awesome control knob, it sits at 100% charged pretty much all the time now (just checked).
I did in the end have to disable the auto-away scheduler of Nest, after 14-days of training it was nowhere near understanding my schedule. This probably saves more Nest battery usage.
