It does indeed seem to indicate that, yet the one time I hid the original OS partition and attempted to boot into the cloned one, booting never completed. So I can only presume there was something necessary on the original Win 7 OS partition, that was no longer accessible due to being hidden.
If you cloned the original partition, then whatever was on the first one is on the second one as well. But it's possible that there were hard-coded references to the first partition, for example, the entries in the BCD (that you see in EasyBCD) are not stored as drive letters but actually references to partition offsets, i.e. the partition starting at byte nnnnnn on disk number xxxx. Cloning a partition would still leave the boot references to the initial partition, so you'd have to make sure that nowhere in the configuration (except for the individual entry for booting into the first partition) are there any references to the first partition (including the `{boot}` configuration).
No doubt this was due to EasyBCD being on the original OS partition ... and perhaps being the missing necessity I mentioned.
Nope, EasyBCD itself is not required. It configures the bootloader components of EasyBCD to be independent of EasyBCD the application. In fact, you can set up your system however way you like it with EasyBCD then fully uninstall EasyBCD and the system will continue to boot, i.e. there is no boot-time dependency on EasyBCD itself.