I would like to know what happens when Google crawls a page that has been permanently redirected. Will Google then index the page as the correct one or will it continue indexing the page the has the 301 redirect? Is there absolutely any consequences for using a 301 redirect? The reason I am concerned about this is because I am considering moving one of my sites to a content management system which would change all the URLs. Many of the URLs have good SE rankings and I don't want to lose them.
301 redirect usually pass PR/link-juice to the redirected page. Google will crawl and index the new page instead of the old one. But 301 redirect does not guarantee that all the PR/link-juice will get transferred to the new URL. Also, after changing URL structure of your site, you can expect to see a temporary drop in ranking even when 301 redirect is used.
Google will understand that the page has permanently moved to another location. you will not loose your back links & page rank of old page, they will take these to redirected page.