With this thing, I'd much prefer to wipe Android from it completely and install a custom Linux (or BSD) distribution, to get more control over how it works. Unfortunately, while this is most likely possible, by the time it gets stable the phone will probably have vanished from the market. The profit margin on these cheap devices is so slow it only takes a tiny market shift to drive them into unprofitability.
1: http://blog.voltagex.org/2015/08/01/booting-the-nexus-4-from...
Looks like Ubuntu, Bodhi and something else all came out with distros for the N7, and then all gave up on them. The only current one is Ubuntu Touch, which is a total dead loss. (They've disabled apt-get...)
At the moment I'm trying to run a Debian userland in a chroot, and it's not working particularly well. If only Android supported virtualisation!
It depends which Nexus 7, but your path will be something like mine: get a kernel running (even if it doesn't complete booting), get libhybris [1] working, get userland working.
You're going to need some kind of serial-out for this.
1: https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris/porte...
Edit: https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo may be useful for both of us