Got all my parts in from Amazon yesterday afternoon and by following the instructions from the Lifehacker page and Aggie MHA's suggestion on emuparadise.com, the kids and I were playing games sitting on the living room floor after dinner.
A couple notes . . . I'm not at all impressed with the Old Skool Tools case, it looks good, but the screws don't hold the top and bottom together worth a damn, it tries to come apart as I handle it. I've already ordered a C4 Labs case to replace it. My recommendation is to do the same unless you're willing to glue the Old Skool case shut.
Don't cheep out on the controllers; I bought two pairs of relatively inexpensive (compared to the Buffalo controllers) NES and SNES controllers off of Amazon, which both had 4 Star ratings. I got what I paid for, they feel cheap in my hands and even my boys noticed that the buttons were sticky and/or unresponsive. I've purchased some refurbed original controllers off of ebay and some usb adapters. Do it right the first time, unlike me.
Thanks for this thread; I searched forever unsuccessfully trying to get my hands on an NES classic and now I have something way better!