I picked up a pre-owned Galaxy Note last month. Running CM10 Paranoid Android on it with the homebrew GNote apk, Memo for S-Pen and Freenote, and I love it to bits. Gives me the same "oooh nice!" sensation I had with my old SE P900 and Nokia E90

Cannot see any reason to lash out on a GN-2 while there are cheap GN's out there to be had.

Superb camera that sparks up instantly, and 1080p video recording that doesn't miss a beat. Video playback of anything you chuck at it (e.g. streaming DVB-S over WLAN using TVHeadEnd and the TVHGuide APK ; a dedicated TVH client) or indeed XBMC native on the phone. It's really a fantastic piece of kit.

Battery life is very decent too, although it suffers in the same way the N900 suffers in the fact that it is so good that it encourages you to spend more time on it, hence battery drains quicker