With regards to the hwclock, it will hold if you have battery power for the RTC. If not, the system will get its time from the timesync daemon (which grabs the time from google). You can use hwclock --systohc to push network time to the RTC. I know that the issue of the clock being off on a reboot before timesync has been mentioned before and is being worked on and possibly available in the next firmware release.
edison login: root
[ 37.422874] systemd-fsck[231]: /dev/mmcblk0p10: Superblock last mount time is in the future.
[ 37.425737] systemd-fsck[231]: (by less than a day, probably due to the hardware clock being incorrectly set) FIXED.
[ 37.428131] systemd-fsck[231]: /dev/mmcblk0p10: Superblock last write time is in the future.
[ 37.431007] systemd-fsck[231]: (by less than a day, probably due to the hardware clock being incorrectly set). FIXED.
[ 37.433668] systemd-fsck[231]: /dev/mmcblk0p10: clean, 16/152608 files, 26870/610299 blocks
root@edison:~#