Overall I like the nook. There were two big selling points that convinced me to get one over the Kindle. The first was the LCD at the bottom, and the second was support for ePub and PDF. If I'm going to buy digital media, I don't want to be locked into one companies format, so the Kindle book format was a big turnoff for me. With the nook, I can buy from Barnes & Noble, the Sony eBook store, or any other site that offers ePub.

petteri explained the LCD at the bottom, though the device does offer physical buttons on the side for page turning as well. The display does try to turn off pretty quickly, so it becomes just a solid non distracting black space at the bottom once you get into a book.

PDF rendering on it is ok, but suffers a bit from the small screen size. It works well enough though, and adding a document is just a simple drag and drop to the documents folder. The nook also exposes the full book storage over USB, so I could back up the files if I wanted, or add them in without directly downloading them on the device. It also has a music player that can play MP3, but no AAC support currently. The built in speaker is ok, but long term, headphones would probably be better.

As petteri said, the 1.1 firmware update fixed a lot of the sluggishness reviewers commented about. That update came out on the day I got my nook back in late December. I'll be curious to see how quickly they roll out additional updates to either add functionality or improve the speed a little more.

I too haven't rooted mine, but the hacker community is quite active. With the base system running Android, many people are finding ways to run existing apps like a browser or mail client on it. And none of the hacks require opening the device, it's just a matter of using the microSD slot on the back, along with a specifically crafted update file to enable root access.