I did a database refresh for 7.01, to allow for a validation testing of SolmanUP to 7.1; while the upgrade failed I did refresh the Dev solman with what Prod was.
That being said, the ABAP portion was the easy part...the Java side of things however is difficult to accomplish. Even by using the sap_inst to export the Prod Java information and import it into the Dev system, I spent the better part of a week with the offline config tool changing old values of the Java stack to the new values (SIDs, Instance numbers, etc).
I also did not have much in functionality of 7.01 (Charm, monitoring, other services) working, so there was no validation done to know if that will break when or if you do a refresh.