On battery topic I have discovered that, as with my other Notes I get excellent battery usage.
Admittedly my own usage is moderate with 4 hours of bluetooth music, a Pebble watch, maybe 1-2 hours of WWF or Draw something a day and general web searches and things.
I was a little surprised at the AOD amount as it is only set to be on between 05:00 and 07:30.
For reference this screenshot was after forgetting to charge last night with maybe only an hour or so total of Draw Something each day.
I'm guessing it masks its usage behing Google Play Services. I need to research how to stop that.
I did however, spend a good 3 or 4 hours wandering round settings looking at things that had cropped up on other forums and a fair bit of time in tasker tweaking scripts so the screen was on a fair bit.
I even forgot to drop the screen brightness from 40% to 30% during that time which is perfectly good enough in my living room.
As an aside I am using Next Launcher. I paid for it back in the day as a thanks for all the team's free apps I has been using under the old name and love the screen transitions I have. Nova probably is just as good these days and there is a whole side of Next I completely ignore (the 3D launcher). It might appeal to some but not me.
I wouldn't hazzard a guess at battery differences for that I'm afraid.