No that's my understanding of it as well. Flashing with the unbranded official rom seems pretty safe (although probably not 100% without risk). Creating a gold card should have no risk to the phone itself as you are only acting against the microsd card not the phone itself so worse case you screw up the card.
The risk levels are the same for most things actually.
If you have to use recovery (FASTBOOT/HBOOT) to flash/root your phone, you are running the (minor) risk of bricking it.
As far as I know, you can always flash a generic rom back on to unroot the phone if you do break it, as explained in my post earlier. So if you did brick it, you can return it for repairs/refunds and so on.
The goldcard itself has nothing to do with the actual bricking, anything in recovery mode can cause the USB drivers to fail, it's not yet known why
As I said, if it annoys you that much, get it flashed. I'd say there's probably less risk than pushing your CPU/RAM when overclocking and so on. You'd probably still do that
It's also worth noting a lot of people have been using USB Hubs and they have ended up with bricked phones, so dont do anything like that. Use a direct port on your motherboard, or a laptop (incase you suffer occasional power cuts).
You might be ok doing it from Windows if you can avoid recovery, there might be a way of doing that, I'm unsure. Probably wont play ball on a branded handset though.
Edit - Some Modaco stats for people who have bricked phones.
On "bricked" population:
- 71% was using a non-stock cable
- 74% was using an USB hub
- 14% was on win32, 7% on win64, 3% on linux32, 1% on linux64
- 11% (way the most) had run 0-10 times the console before bricking, 7% 10-20 times, 3% 21-30 times
The brick problem is so small (about 60-70 devices) that the data gathering probably isn't very accurate, but you can see from there, use your stock USB cable, plug it into your motherboard, use Linux64 if you can (although that is probably because a lot more use Windows).
Your risk then would be extremely low.
