The UI responsiveness is looking a little sad, including the touch input with jerky & slow animation and scrolling:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/10/26/hands-on-with-the-nook-color/

Maybe it's something they can address in software, but I doubt it will be in the first release since it ships on Nov 19th. But maybe it's all down to the processor and graphics core on the product. I don't think that spec was mentioned anywhere.

They'll need to improve this to better compete with other Android 7" devices.

The UI paradigms and features look very god though. It still needs some polish, especially the views where you select tiles (media items and folders) - it needs some animation. See previous paragraph for why it might not be present.

I think a B&N app with these features would be killer for the iPad. Obviously it isn't going to be able to be quite as rich as it won't have its own set of extra apps, nor would they likely be able to have it run purchases through the app itself.