Yep, its basically manual log shipping. I've never used log shipping to accomplish this task because databases in my environment that I would be moving like this are already in FULL recovery. I generally off my existing backup set to perform all but the tail log restores. However, I have found in explaining this on the forums that people asking how to minimize down times, aren't in FULL recovery, and it is easier to explain how to manually do this, than to get them to setup log shipping to accomplish the same thing.