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I have a couple of NUCs at home, all set up as HTPC rigs. One sitting on a bench, one under a TV unit and a third on the supplied mount, hiding behind the respective TV. I have been really impressed with them as a HTPC and was thinking about buying another one whenever I actually manage to build my observatory. The ones I have now are the original generation I3 and Celeron versions.
I ran into what was probably the heat issue once on one of them and solved it by re seating the SSD and going back to the default cooling profile (I set it to quiet before that) I am only using a 32GB SSD though which may reduce the heat load.
In my case as a HTPC it was a 10 minute install of Openelec (XBMC pre packaged with a stripped down version of Linux) and they have been pretty much appliance like for a year or so.
Power draw is insignificant IMO, playing video they use under 20W (Calculated with a clamp ammeter on the active conductor at 240V) idle was about 14 and sleeping about 12W and just about the same when fully off. It just wont get much lower than that. I only have them sleep as one is in our bedroom and the only place the cooling fan is audible is, you guessed it, my pillow! I think nearly half the running power draw (Which is still pretty lightly loaded) is coming form the power brick so the only significant reduction to be had would be to switch off at the wall instead of sleeping or off.
Glad to hear you did not have too many issues as I was thinking seriously about one for astro stuff.
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