A lot of what you ask are based on personal preferences in your workflow. For example, I no longer shoot Raw+JPEG because I find I can produce a set of JEPGs faster in LR and they match the Raw rendering I wish, where using the exiting camera JPEGs, its a pain to try to get the two to match. Plus, I have more room on the card, easier filing in LR.
What I do is copy all the images from a card to a folder on a drive I plan to use for storing all images (I'm currently using a 750 gig Raid drive). NOTHING is on that drive but images and the LR catalogs (that makes it easy for me to clone all this to another driver as a back up or onto a portable drive to take on the road).
I usually make a folder that has a name that represents the images. I copy the images to that folder from the finder. I suggest this because newer users often say "I don't know where my images are in LR" but if you manually place the images onto a location this way, well you know where you put em right?
Then in Lightroom, I import all the images and of course, I know where to navigate to for these images since I just put them in the folder. I can use the "Import from current location" option, have metadata added at the same time etc. At this time, I convert all the images to DNG because I don't want an sidecar files floating around.
Because I've made a folder with a descriptive name (say "Dogs"), I can use the custom naming template and utilize the token called "Folder Name" such that all the images will now be named based on that folder. Very cool. IF I move the images to another folder, and this is important, I'll do this from WITHIN Lightroom, once I rename them, they no longer have a name based on the wrong folders which is a plus. I usually add the folder name + date (year, month, day) and then some trailing values (001, 002). LR will do this for you.
Now I'll go through the images in Loupe mode and simply type either a P or an X (P is pick, that's a winner for sure, X is a reject, I'm going to trash the file for sure). Everything else is not rated, I'm not sure its great and I'm sure I don't want to lose it. Then I'll delete all the X images, maybe rename if I'm anal and want the number sequence to be prefect but that's not really necessary. Now we could do something like make star ratings (I have a four and five store rating for Picks making two levels of such images). I use 0-3 for the unrated images (zero means, its pretty close to being reject while 3 means, it might actually make it into the pick+4 rating). Anyway, the idea here is to simply give the images a quality rating. I use color labels for keeping track of progress of the images as they get worked on. IOW, colors can and will change as the images progress. For example, I have a color for images that need to be printed. I have a color for images that have made a round trip to Lightroom and back. I have a color for legacy images that were from the old days when I wasn't using LR but want them in the database.
That's basically how I get the images into LR before I even worry about quick develop or develop. But that's just one of a million ways to do this, in the end, you just find a system that works well for you.
Note that you CAN make a folder from within Import and move the images into them all from within LR, I only recommend you do this externally until you're comfortable with where all this stuff lives on the drive. Once you do have images inside LR< its really important not to move them outside LR or it will not know where they've gone (not a huge problem, you can always update the folders from within LR but again, as you become more comfortable with the product does this seem more intuitive). If you move images within LR, make new folders there etc, it will always know what you did and keep track of the images.