Yes, there is a version jump compared to the previous 7.44 release; this is to indicate that this Drupal 7 point release is a bit larger than past ones and makes a few more changes and new features available than normal.

Updating your existing Drupal 7 sites is recommended. Backwards compatibility is still being maintained, although read on to find out about a couple of changes that might need your attention during the update.

When specifying dependencies in your module's .info file, you now can (and are encouraged to) specify the project that your module depends on also (since Drupal 7.40) - for example, dependencies[] = views:views_ui to declare a dependency on the Views UI module within the Views project, rather than just dependencies[] = views_ui. This extra information will help resolve ambiguities and can potentially be used by other tools in the future, for example by the drupal.org testbot or Drush to be able to automatically download dependencies that currently can't be downloaded automatically.

One of your modules can create a node object without any title or a language and you don't want that. Similar to the Restful module that handle each field in a separate method(s) you can define a plugin and set methods to validate the object you'r dealing with. For more examples you can the Entity validate example module and look on the test and how to interact with the API of the module.

Sandbox project for exploring using the Migrate module for migrating data between different versions of Drupal.