general question

I am going through the getting started tut, and had a question. During the tut, I am entering the info on the catalog pages and detail pages...description and the like. Since the id is identical on both of those entries...do all the other fields need to be identical?
For example: on the catalog page for id1, I entered exactly like I was supposed to. But when doing the detail page for the same product id1....everything is the same except in the description tag. (typed "the newest from jenna" instead of "the latest from jenna")

Would that cause problems in real world screnarios, or would it not matter since they are 2 different references (on seperate web pages)?

Minor discrepancies in the name or description will not have a major effect on the cart. In reality, you will only experience this sort of thing on a static cart. In a dynamic cart, where the information is being pulled from a database, this would not happen.