One bit of information to keep in mind. "Initial" manning of any ship/boat happens in waves or stages. The first group of around 20 or so Nukes will be fairly senior personnel. First Classes and Chiefs, LCDRs, probably a Master Chief and the Reactor Officer. They will go to Design School, then spend time learning about the plant, especially since it will be a new design, and attending every school available.
As far as needing "NUBS", that phase may be at least 18 months down the road. Also, in the past, the first couple of phases included zero first tour sailors.
While your quote is true enough, my experience with precommissioning the bush differs slightly. I was not in the initial wave of manning, but i was one of the first hundred or so to report (roughly second wave) and there were plenty of "nubs" to go around... give or take 1/4 of those reporting before or shortly after me were straight from prototype (well, not really, they went to another carrier to get a basic nuke qual out of the way, but they were still nubs). The first group is also not all first classes and chiefs as far as the enlisted go either, even as an ET there were plenty of seconds showing up from various commands (myself being one of them).
As far as should you do it for your intial tour, your preferences should depend heavily on what you want to get out of the navy. If you want to see the world, one surefire way to do very little of that is to report to a precom CVN during initial manning. If you are looking to minimize your sea time however, pre-com is an excellent way to accomplish this as you'll be looking at probably a ride along for a month or three, and then stick in 1 deployment towards the end of your tour with the associated workups and sea trials (if you dont' transfer to prototype first that is).
To the point of not being able to qualify PPWS, it's fairly rare for someone to qualify PPWS on their first tour or as a second anyways, but I didn't notice a significant difference between the bush and my first ship in that regard. As far as qualifying over and over, there's typically phases of qualification and yes it's a continual process but it is also not as rediculous as it may seem . You aren't really qualifying repeatedly, you're just doing the things that would have needed to be done anyways but couldn't because you didn't own the system or you weren't operating. It's definately better than being a nub for 2 and a half years because you can't do your practical factors for watch. Some of the bad in my opinion included adding additional red tape that you had to go through just to do your job. There's already enough to go through to do maintenance in the first place, but adding in shipyard procedure really complicates the matter from a ships force standpoint. From the position of LPO it was also a heavy workload to stand up the various workcenters / shops, but it did provide ample opportunity for someone to stand out among his/her peers.
All in all, precom is definately not an all around bad deal, but don't expect to go there and live our your days in the land of milk and honey either. As with any tour, there will be ups and downs along the way but it's definately a unique experience and i'm not disappointed that i chose to do it instead of transferring to prototype.
hopefully that feedback was helpful.