Interesting. I'm on the 360 as well and I've only crashed once when I was on the way to High Hrothgar from Whiterun. I was expecting it to be much worse after dealing with New Vegas where it would crash AND corrupt your autosave at the same time. If you didn't save in that game like you said, you'd be totally screwed.
My save file is only 8-9mb and the GD game crashes every 45min or so, first I thought it was due to my console over heating but I solved that and still no change. I've done the cach dump thing several time to no avail. I'm not having the texture issues that some are having nor have I had any bugged quests( fingers crossed/knocks on wood) but the crashes happen often enough that I'm forced to save my game every 10-15min(manually) so as to not lose an hour and a half's worth of work.
