If you were coming from 11.04, you'd have to upgrade to 11.10 anyway, since you can only upgrade from one release directly to the next one, or one LTS to the next. That's why I suspect you were on 11.04 and not 10.04 (it's not possible to upgrade directly from 10.04 or 10.10 to 11.10).

The alternative would have been a clean reinstall.

So basically you did the right thing.