To the OP, both the Nook and the Kindle are now available in places where you should able to actually try them out for a bit. Find them, handle them, read for a bit on them, browse their bookstores, and try their other features.
For us, the Kindle won by a wide margin over the Nook because of features and ease of use. I personally use the Kindle as much if not more for checking email and looking things up on-line as I do for book reading, so the free 3G web browsing (which wasn't even an option on Nook at the time) and hard keyboard were a big plus for me.
Plus, We like shopping at Amazon eBook store better better than B&N...we always seem to be getting free Amazon gift cards from various sources.
My wife is the big-multi-book-per-week reader, and she probably would have been happy with either device.
I probably should not mention that most of the books we read on our Kindle are not from the Amazon store but from libraries and other sources, because it may interfere with my
master plan.
ApK