I just ordered a NookColor which I will root as soon as it arrives to have a 7inch tablet, probably put honeycomb on it, and then when the market settles down a bit I'll order a second or third gen ten inch. I want both for different reasons.
Nice.
The awesome thing about the NookColor is that it can boot ROMs straight off the sdcard. So you can pop in the card to run a Honeycomb ROM (for example) and then remove it to just use rooted stock or any other ROM.
Right now I have a rooted stock ROM with all the Google apps and Zeam launcher. There's a popular ROM called Nookie Froyo, and an early port of CyanogenMod 7 (Gingerbread), but not all the features are working on those two yet as I understand it.
I'll probably try and boot a Honeycomb ROM off the sdcard next week when I have a bit more free time. I'm hesistant so far though and the reason for that is because the current Honeycomb ROMs are all hacked together using the SDK. They also don't have the tablet specific versions of the core Google apps like the new 3D YouTube and Music apps and the tablet edition of the Market (which looks totally different from the phone version
as you can see here
The Honeycomb source code is expected to be dropped into the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) code-base imminently, and after that happens we will see some proper Honeycomb ROMs. I might just wait for that to happen. Depends how impatient I get. Given that I spent 10-15 minutes playing with XOOM last week, I'm in no rush to start poking around Honeycomb. I know what's there and how it all works.
For me the benefit of the NC, or any 7" tablet, is the portability and the usage as an e-reader. I use the Amazon Kindle app and it's awesome. I've already purchased 5 books on it and I've already probably read more using it than I have read actual books in the last 12 months or so. A 10" tablet would be more handy for other use cases in the future, but I'm happy with the size of the NC.
Did you take advantage of the Barnes & Noble eBay offer? They had a coupon for their eBay store where you could get the NC for $199.99 rather than $250.