Active Data Guard Feature Of 11g To Run Live Reports On Standby

We have 10g physical standby set in our environment and we are migrating to 11g now. We want to use the active data guard feature of 11g to run the live reports on standby rather production. Questions I have is:

1) On our current 10g standby environment, we use db_name=cusms which is exactly matching with the production database name. I don't see we are using database_unique name on our standby. But I have read several blogs where everyone talks about using db_unique name on standby and db_name can be exactly matching with production on 11g. I wanted to know, is db_unique name a new requirement to have on 11g? can I go ahead and not use db_unique name and just have db_name exactly matching with production? What are the implications of doing so? The reason we want to stick to this is in-case of failover we want the database name to be the same. But I want to hear your thoughts on this:

2)While building standby, I did noticed few things and want your clarifications:

a.On standby database, should I mount instance using pfile or spfile or it doesn't matter?
b. Lets say if I use either spfile or pfile, can I just have db_unique name in that file and just start the instance in no mount and do the duplicate from rman?
c.As soon as my duplicate target database for standby from active database got finished, I usually exit the rman session and go to sqlplus and shutdown the standby instance. (Is this ok to do)
d.Then I start the standby instance with startup (mount and open the database) this should open the standby database in read only mode. Following I issue alter database recover managed standby database using current logfile disconnect to put the database in recovery mode. (any steps missing here)
e.Then go to primary and do few log switches and come back to standby to see if the primary changes moved to secondary or not.

But what I have observed is:

a. When I do the duplicate it runs successful. But during the course of duplicate, primary system generates few archives which are not shipped or applied on standby. When I go to standby to recover the database, it says media recovery needed and ask for archives files. I need to manually move this files from primary to standby to apply. Isn/t this automatically taken care?
b. I also noticed after I can not open the standby database in read only mode after the duplicate command. While trying to open, it says database media recovery needed. What's the best procedure to open the database in read only mode immediately?
c. On my standby init.ora lets say if I use db_unique name, where would my control file be place? Will oracle create controlfile from primary and put it on my standby database and put an update an entry into my pfile or spfile?