Migrating from wordpress.com

Hi- I am sitting on the fence about migrating my free wordpress.com blog to self hosted & I am not sure where to direct my questions to so I hope someone here can help me …

I want to use my own domain name, which will be different to the one I use on WordPress.com, so I am trying to find out whether if I do this, the wordpress.com url will or can be redirected to my new .com site? So that if someone goes to the old blog it will instantly bring them to my new .com site?

Other question is, what happens to the people who have “followed” my wordpress.com page and all the stats for that site? Do I lose all of that, or will they come over when I migrate the wordpress.com blog to the new page?