[rhmeyering]

No, if your IP space is non-portable from ISP, your ISP is resposnible for PTR records since they own the IP addreess space.

Yes, I would popualte "A" records, NS Records and MX Records on the DNS servers. If CheckPoint DNS proxy fails at least you have something to answer the DNS querries. It might not ne load balanced but DNS can do round robin is you give it two IP for an "A" record, NS records will be load balanced due to the nature of DNS and "MX" records can have a priority (preference) give to each record.