Correct way of creating news section

Say you have a regular website with some static Pages and a news/blog section for the dynamic posts. The front page is static. So:
/
/about/
/contact/
/news/

There are currently different things I can do:

1) Create a page “news”. And then in the Options > reading set the Posts page to the page “news”. Now when you visit
example.com/news/
you will see a list of your latests posts. Clicking one of the posts leads you to that single post, for example
example.com/2011/02/my-post-name

2) Next thing I can do is create a rewrite/custom permalink option for “news”. Go to Options > permalinks and create a custom permalink structure, in this case:
/news/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
In this case, when you visit
example.com/news/
again, you will see a list of your latests posts. Clicking one of the posts leads you to that single post, for example
example.com/news/2011/02/my-post-name
so this time each post is “inside” /news/

Subjectively, this seems better to me.

My question: I now have created both a “static” page “news” and a permalink rewrite with a static first section “news”. In the past I have had problems with WP getting in trouble with the rewrite rules. Is there some danger in what I do here?
It seems to work and looking at the rewrite option field in the database, in both cases I get 153 rules. However, I’m not sure if having both a page “news” and a rewrite “news” is bad in some way.