Well the profile you create (for yourself, technically) doesn't need to have any friends or any personal information on it, it just 'owns' the Page.
As for businesses setting themselves up with profiles as if they were people, I don't know what Facebook are going to do about those, but it is against their policies, and in the 'Report this profile' tab there's an option to report a profile because it's not a real person
I guess for you the real question is whether to set it up as a Page or as a Group and I'm not sure I can offer much guidance there. My own tendancy would be towards a Page, it seems more logical to me.
As a person, I'd *Like* ('become a fan of') a business or product, but would join a group based on a common theme (i.e a Page for 'John's Coffee Shop' but a group for 'Irish coffee lovers')
I presume there's some official info on facebook's site to explain all this to business owners, but i haven't seen that myself, I just sort of added these things as i saw them appear on my own friends' pages, good luck anyway