How can I pull the latest published revision for a referenced node using the CCK node reference field?
Which module are you using to get forward-revisions? Revisioning?

This just seems like a bug in node reference field in that it makes the assumption that the latest revision is always published (which is true in core).

http://drupal.org/node/738116 has a patch which seems like it fixes node titles on auto-complete widgets and in the list of nodes. But it falls short of completely fixing the issue.