General questions about Bluetooth

I have been fiddling with Bluetooth lately and I feel as if there is some elusive thing I am missing, anyways here are some of my questions. What I want is to have my Bluetooth enabled laptop running Windows, communicate with my iOS device.

Is Bluetooth LE compatible with older Bluetooth technologies?

-My believe is that Bluetooth LE is the same as other Bluetooth versions only that of course, as the name implies, it is low power. My confusion arises from the fact that on the iOS page they refer to some of the schemes as GAT servers , and what I am guessing is another protocol, ATT. Upon reading the article posted Here there is no mention of these two only L2CAP. As well as there is no mention of those in the Bluetooth API for windows Programming with Windows sockets

-How is a connection between the two devices started?

I know that there are service ID's which can be published in an internal Service Description server according to the article previously referenced. However there is no concrete mentioning on the iOS bluetooth pages. They mention peripherals advertising bundles of data and the central device connecting to it. No mention of SDP, unsure if the windows docs do. And I' am bit confused do the two devices connect first and then one device checks what services are available and the other one subscribes. Here by services I mean which applications are running, and by connection I mean as in establishing a connection from say (in iOS) Settings>Bluetooth and then starting the application on your phone, and then it is able to scan, or can the process of enabling Bluetooth and establishing a connection be done in the application itself.

-Is it pivotal to assign which device is the central and which is the peripheral?

Since at the end of the day they are able to both exchange data. In my case I have want to have my computer running windows 8 communicate with my iOS 7 device. Now as mentioned there are two roles that you could choose from in iOS: Peripheral and Central. It makes sense to me that the phone should be a peripheral since the main application will run on my computer, and I want my computer to enter the listening state before the device, and have the device connect afterwards. I am also unsure (too much doubts and confusion) on what the best practices are and how to tackle this problem.