Yeah, the loot at the end wasn't anything spectacular, but you can get some pretty good stuff out of the Torgue Venders.
Question: I just beat the main story the other night and unlocked "True Vault Hunter Mode"... If I start that mode with my current character (36 Gunzerker) and save it, will I be able to return to the first playthrough and continue to finish up quests? Basically what I mean is : Can I switch between saves or will it overwrite my first game?
Yeah you can switch between them at any time. You have to choose 'select character', load them up then it will ask you what difficulty you want.
They are not completely separate, if you quit TVHM at the Southern Shelf and went back to normal, you would end up at SS in your normal game again too even if you were somewhere else at the time on that difficulty. Doesn't happen if you havent unlocked the area yet though.
For some reason it wipes all your skill point allocations and you have to respec again once you switch, but that probably wont be too often.
TVHM gets a lot harder than normal, its good to have golden keys saved up for it.
Your shield will get broken 'a lot', I ended up using a low capacity/fast recharge shield at level 50 for that reason (with a gunzerker too).