I've messed around with a Kindle before, and I can tell you that, although I found the experience to be a bit too weird to be a normal thing for me—the button-happy interface isn't as clean and intuitive as it should be, and while I hear you get used to the whole "screen-flashes-a-negative-while-turning-the-page" thing, I was incredibly annoyed by it—the Kindle is about three billion times better than Nook. The Nook is painfully slow, the touch screen is inexact and the interaction between the two screens is horrible; download speeds were glacial, and it took a minute and a half for the book to appear on the screen after I chose it from the menu. And that's a book that already existed in the machine's memory.
I am unsurprised that B&N just laid off an unspecified number of employees from their digital division; this thing is a disaster. Avoid the Nook at all costs.
