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.

How to do that here

https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/how-to-move-your-saves-from-steam-cloud-to-grim-dawns-default-location/28921

powbam's posted some screenshots on how to do it at the end of the thread as well.

But with local saves the game acccesses either Steam or GOG so no need to transfer in the first place. Sorry, had brain failure before. I have both Steam and GOG versions and local saving works perfectly for both. Still, up to you if you want to continue using cloud saving or not.

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.