I built a bike for my mother with a red band Nexus 8 speed. She is thrilled with it so far. The fram I used is an old Schwinn World Sport that came from a scrap steel dumpster (and is in great shape, considering).
I am planning on taking the measurements to see how tricky it would be to adapt a Dura Ace bar-end shifter to control the Nexus hub. The only thing I see potentially being a problem is that the gear indexes in the hub are probably not of uniform size. The indexes on the bar-end shifter I have are uniformly sized, so it might be a tricky process to get the system adjusted.
If it only takes a ratio adjustment (meaning that the indexes are all uniform, but the shifter shifts too far or too short compared to the hub), then the shifter could be made to work by manufacturing some type of pulley system like a travel agent to adapt the cable pull to the correct ratio.
Once I get around to doing this, I will definitely be posting about my results since I know that a lot of people are excited about the nexus hubs but are put off by the lack of shifters for road bars (including drops, bullhorns, moustache, time trial, etc.) including myself. If I get this to work, I would probably install an inline 8-speed gear indicator to be able to tell what gear the shifter is set to without having to guess or count clicks.
For the time being, I would recommend doing a little custom work to build a stub onto your stem to hold the shifter or something. One of those T-shaped accessory mounts might be just the ticket as long as you don't mind reaching towards the stem to shift.