I'll chime in here as I to have B&N nook. I love it. The display at the bottom is a touch screen and is used for menu navigation and turing the page. It's a LCD capacitive touchscreen.

Before the first firmware revision the unit was a little sluggish but that has been mostly fixed. It does seem to get a little wonky when you first turn on the 3G services. I almost always have it in airplane mode and just turn on the wireless wifi at the start of the day to get any updated material and then turn it back off.

Battery power seems to be a bit less than advertised, but I rarely go more than a few days without charging it so I can't really say.

nookdevs.com is a site that provides instructions on how to root the device but I have not done that.