This game and the PS3 version look great. Does anyone know if this is at all import friendly for an English speaker?

Not sure if you're still keen on an answer five days later, but having just started the game tonight, I thought I'd chime in with my thoughts. Ni no Kuni isn't the most import unfriendly game in the world. The upper screen is used to point you towards your objectives on the map and you could (probably) intuit your way through most of the battle menus since there's nothing super unusual in them. That being said, there are still parts of the game where you need to be paying attention to the dialog to know how to move the story forward and the 360+ page book it comes with is necessary in order to figure out spell information (ie: what to draw and how, their effects, etc.), as the game is very specifically designed to be used in tandem with it. Even from what little I've played so far, which is about two hours, you're probably going to need a guide of some sort, as well as potentially a translation for the book, in order to get through it. Whether that sort of information exists is something I don't know since I speak Japanese, so I haven't really looked into it. That being said, it doesn't look like GameFAQs has much, so that might be a general indicator.

There's also just the issue of missing out on story stuff by not knowing the language. You can pick up the basics by just watching the cutscenes and inferring what's going on, but there's always nuances in the dialog that make the experience more enjoyable.

Apparently there's a lot of Japanese in it but tofugu.com (japanese language learning site) put it on their top 5 games to learn with. http://www.tofugu.com/2011/10/10/top-5-nintendo-ds-games-for-learning-japanese/