Sorry, Nikon missed the boat. The people who have been paid by Nikon to say what a great system this is can now leave the building. Yes, it has super AF. Big deal. It needs a whole lot more to appeal to knowledgeable enthusiasts, starting with a decent (larger) sensor.
The J1/V1 is simply not a camera targeting experts, it targets the remaining 95% of the market. This being said, I agree 100% with the comments made by Michael in this excellent review.
I personally find the J1 to make a lot more sense than the V1 since it is really faithful to the point and shoot design philosophy of the 1 series. I see the V1 as a half baked "expert" model that didn't go far enough. The Z1 will fill that gap later together with the f0.7 lenses for which Nikon submitted a recent patent.
As I wrote before, the J1 is perfect when you need a camera that is small and delivers 99% focused and perfectly exposed images (it does expose significantly more accurately than the D800 or any other DSLR I have used). The video image quality is very good too.
My wife and I have been using it to shoot images of our recently born little baby girl, and it works very well for that.
Does the system have potential from an image quality standpoint? Well if you check DxOMark you'll realized that its image quality today is very close to that of the originial Canon 1Ds up to ISO400, which back then was considered to be medium format territory.
5 years ago, nobody thought that 4/3 had any potential, now some people compare the image quality of the Olympus OMD at ISO 6400 to that of the Canon 5DIII... so it should be pretty obvious that the sensor of the 1 series is large enough in the mid to long term.
Cheers,
Bernard