MacOS – Clean install of Mountain Lion on MBP early 2011 failed

The recovery partition on your original disk was the only supported method until the Recovery Disk Assistant was made available.

The bulk of this answer was written before the official steps were published - so I would recommend the Recovery Disk Assistant even though HT4718 steps help understand what is happening under the hood.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

The easiest is to get a drive enclosure or adapter and re-run the Lion installer from the Recovery HD and install Lion onto the new SSD.

It likely won't matter if the drive with the recovery HD is on an external bus or an internal bus, but I would keep the original drive inside the mac until you have Lion installed on your SSD connected to an external port.

Boot off the SSD to test it and run migration from the internal drive to the SSD before doing swapping the drives inside your mac.

It still boggles my mind that any mac will ship without some sort of reinstall media. Look in the center of the box, under where the mac sat. Call apple if your media is missing so they can ship it to you or point out how they want you to reinstall the OS on a new drive. Your mac's hard drive is listed as a consumer replaceable part, so they have to provide you with the steps to do that.

Installing cleanly gives you the advantage that you will know if an error is due to the "as-shipped" condition of the software before you add your data and applications to the mix. The installation of a new OS is the primary time when people notice corruption of a filesystem or other hardware type errors since a machine can often keep running well with some little errors. But relinking all the kernel extensions and drivers and knowing that your accessories and applications will all take to a major new OS is a lot of change. Spending a little extra time up front can help isolate issues if you have them.

By running the migration later, you have more control over things and can also choose to hand migrate anything first that you don't trust the tools to automate.