In case you missed it, BackTrack 5 R1 has been released.

Download from backtrack-linux.org

Yep I think you can do this:

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

.....although this might not work until they post it normally. Seems they get too much traffic right away so they make people use torrents at first.

better way to do the update.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

How I've done it on my debian boxes. Things can break sometimes doing dist-upgrade without the regular one first.

*speaking from bad experiences where I had to rebuild the box.