There are three nooks in my house, and I find very little to agree with you.
Then, there were the restrictions. 80% of the storage was reserved for DRM'd material - if you downloaded restriction-free files from Gutenberg or similar you could only fill 20% of the provided storage. Oh, and remember all those "free" books I researched before buying it? *Every one* on the US site refused to download saying that "For copyright reasons this content is restricted to US downloads only". Even though I was in Scotland, and the books were published in Scotland, *in the 1800s*...
Ebooks take up so little space, that I've found that isn't a problem. It might be different if I wanted to store movies on our various nooks (a simple touch, a nook color, and a nook tablet) but having books hasn't been a problem yet.
Oh, and the clunky DRM support requires you to run a piece of third-party (Adobe) software to "authenticate" the device that's not available in any form under Linux. I ended up having to download and install a pirate copy of Windows just to be able to initialise the machine! (I feel so *dirty*...)
HUH?!? I don't have any windows machines in my house, and I have no problems with any of our nooks. This doesn't match up with my experience at all. I connect the nook to my linux computer with the cable provided, and load whichever epub files I want. It may be different for me because I run opensuse, which isn't the most popular linux distro, but I seriously doubt that. Really this seems to come out of left field. I have absolutely no problem at all using my nooks with a linux computer and I don't have any (pirated or genuine) copies of windows.
The credit card complaint is legitimate. But other tablets are the same. I created a single-use charge number using my credit card's "online shopping" features, and never worried about it again.
are they perfect? No. They make great e-readers, but unless you root them, they make poor tablets. That having been said, in my experience they are not nearly as poor as the OP's experience.