I've only spent half a day with it, but my first impressions are thus. It's partly about Android, since this is my first Android device, and partly about the Nexus itself.
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It's small! It's comfortable to hold in one hand, and the keyboard is a great size — where touchscreen phones are too small for proper two-thumbed typing, and where it can sometimes (with my tiny hands at least) be occasionally difficult to reach the middle of the keyboard on iPad, I've found the keyboard on the Nexus to be a great size. Swype adds some icing to the already-nice cake.
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Build quality is excellent; it has a satisfying heft without being heavy, the leathery-plastic back is nice and grippy, and it just generally feels solid and well-constructed — in absolute terms, not just for its price point.
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The screen is lovely; side-by-side with a retina iPad it's perhaps slightly inferior but as general usage goes it's an absolute pleasure. When you consider the cost, it's absolutely phenomenal.
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Google integration is as good as I ever could have imagined; it's my only Android device, so I didn't benefit from things like synchronisation of device settings from my phone like other people have, but even just tight integration with Google Apps is great since all my accounts are Google ones. The Gmail app in particular is great, and it's nice that things like labels are first-class citizens rather than just being buried as IMAP folders.
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Jelly Bean (though I suppose the genesis is in ICS) is, for the most part, genuinely well-designed and is at times even beautiful. Third-party apps are a crapshoot, though.
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I think the homepage–app launcher distinction is of merit; I like having widgets on my home screen and find them useful, and don't mind that apps are therefore an extra tap away.
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The price! Honestly, it could be a tenth as good as it is and it would be worth far more than £160. It's a no-brainer.
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The touch screen feels perceptibly slightly worse than the iPad's, but it's something that's inconsistent across applications; I found myself frustrated at mis-clicking links within Chrome in a way that I never do when using Chrome on the iPad. It makes link-heavy pages like Hacker News a real chore — lots of zoom-tap-unzoom-zoom-tap to make sure I was hitting the right target.
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I'm not sure if it's the screen size or shitty websites UA-sniffing, but I seem to always get served mobile versions of sites. Luckily Chrome on Android has a "request desktop version" action that clears it up, but it's still a common annoyance. Probably not its fault, though.
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Text selection is truly awful — I don't think iOS is spectacular but I spent about five minutes trying to select a passage of text in Instapaper, including after zooming the text to ~32pt, and still couldn't get it to behave properly — I'd position the opening part of the selection, and then in moving the closing one it would move my opening one! I've had a few little frustrations like this that I don't think I've had on iOS, and it does colour my impression of Android generally.
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No 3G — I have a 3G iPad, but I'd happily swap the 3G onto this and have a WiFi iPad, since the Nexus is so portable.
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That general, almost imperceptible, but constantly nagging feeling that there's a lack of consistency and polish throughout the whole ecosystem. It feels like Google have cleaned up their act massively with 4.0, but the third-party app ecosystem still seems — from my limited experience — to be massively inconsistent, both in methodology but also in quality. I may just be missing the killer apps on Android, but I don't feel like I've had the same experience I would have had after a day of playing with an iPad for the first time and of using the top ~20 or so iPad apps; I just think they deliver a clarity and consistency of vision and implementation that I simply haven't seen on Android.