1 - We use thumbor for serving our images, so changing the width in the URL isn't enough, you also need to change the crop parameters and the anti-tamper signing part.
2 - We actually use different markup in places, some of our homepage slides use 2 or 4 images at desktop sizes, but only 1 at tablet and smaller.
What we're doing is using a modified version of picturefill.js, where we wrap each picture component in another component that controls what widths we load it at.
You can see it in play here: http://www.onefinestay.com/