According to someone on another forum who claims to work at B&N in the electronics dept, (take that for what it is
) he said that the upgrade will not allow access to the marketplace, although there will be a few more reader oriented apps available.
Obviously, we won't know until it gets here, but it seems that B&N is taking the control freak approach (ala Apple) and will never market the Nook as a real tablet. My personal opinion is that it seems they're looking to get a lock on the reader market by making their reader better and keeping it proprietary for maximum profit down the road. Again, it is my opinion that this is a mistake. It's a big gamble on their part.
I've rooted, and couldn't be happier. If B&N never updated anything, I wouldn't care. The B&N reader functionally is not affected, and I can get anything else I want in the Android world now. And most of it is free or really inexpensive.
Az