FWIW, I did this last night. (Thanks again, Foukey!) I thought I'd share the perspective of the technologically challenged -- or as my wife likes to call me, "that idiot."
I bought the NC by combining a Groupon coupon + buying some electronic gift cards at 15% off from Cardpool (plus some money I had at BN). Not including the credit we had at BN, we got about $50 off that way. It just takes buying the electronic version of the GCs at the beginning of the day, and having them email you the number/pin before heading over the store. Perhaps excessive, but saving a few dollars is a tenet of my religion.
My wife picked it up late last night. (They have a ton of stock at Chestnut Hill, fwiw.) I've never rooted anything before, though I do own an Android phone. I had previously spent an hour or two reading about what to do, read this thread and its links, and watched the video I linked to earlier (and I think one at nookdevs). Just reading didn't make as much sense as seeing how simple it was through the video. I made the mistake of trying to do this from a Mac at first, which did not work well - I couldn't get the Mac to transfer the img file to the sd card properly. I moved over to the PC, downloaded winimage, and it took about 15 minutes to complete an autonooter root (software 1.0.1 was preloaded, so I didn't need to do anything there). I upgraded to the 1.1.0 rom (I decided to wait until HC works well to do anything else), and it took another 15 minutes from start to finish, again following the video instructions from theunlockr (with another 5 minutes to add back YouTube, which 1.1.0 dropped - easy instructions on how to do that from XDA).
I haven't tried to overclock or anything, and I chose the easy but limited (no flash) 1.1.0 release, but it works well as a very stable, basic tablet, for a bit under $200 after discounts. I'm just using zeam launcher for now to keep it simple. Google Maps even finds the location well enough by ip address. I'd not use this to replace an iPad - it really doesn't appear to do things like movies/tv shows well (I may be in the minority, but I actually like the way that works on the iPad), yet, though I haven't really played too much. But its a very solid, and relatively cheap, tablet for doing nearly everything else.