1) Does the game actually work properly on GOG, cause while I'd love to have a DRM free version that I can back-up and keep forever, I see a lot of topics about people having issues with getting it working. I've got it on Steam and it works fine, does that mean it will work on GOG too?

2) I like using cloudsaves (with offline backups, of course) so if I'm playing on my laptopI can still access my characters. Is it possible to transfer my characters from Steam to GOG (presumably from the aforementioned backups) and get them on the GOG cloud?

1. Works fine.

2. You can take a steam cloud save, make it a local save and then transfer that to the GOG version. That's what I did when I tried a weekend grim dawn freebie on Steam. I don't remember the details but you can search for it like I did and it was easy to find out how.

Cloud saving in GOG does use the local saves, it just generates a duplicate, so you can use local saves, even the tools that require local saves in Steam and still use GOGs Cloud feature ;)

Thank you for the help everyone. I've gone ahead and gotten it over here and it appears to be working fine.

Had the GoG version for more than a year. No issues.