There is no recovery for the tablet. So if you're going to try to OC it before coming up with a valid recovery, I suggest you get a bunch of these. Because your going to end up with a pile of bricks.
If you read the Nook forums, they're saying that OC'ing actually makes the battery last longer, and that the unit doesn't overheat. For the most part, you're right -- it is plenty fast. But I expect that if anyone gets Honeycomb working on this platform, it will take a bit more juice to keep from lagging. Unfortunately, it sounds like there's more to it than going into the BIOS and setting a couple of parameters.
I'm surprised that you don't like the battery life. I have the 8024 and I'm very impressed with it. I'm able to stream flash all of the Monaco GP live on Sunday with less than half of the battery used. That's 100% cpu with wifi on for over two hours straight. It beats my 6 cell net book