How to display the average rating of a node as stars in a view?
This is what I came up with:

Create a Views template for this specific field and put it in your theme (or module if you have Views templates already there and enabled via the Views api hook).

In my case it was called views-view-field--top-content--page-1--value.tpl.php for just the included and now enabled top content View.

In there, do the following:

&lt;?php
  $data = $row-&gt;{$field-&gt;field_alias};
  $path = drupal_get_path('module', 'fivestar');
  print theme('fivestar_static', array('rating' =&gt; $data, 'widget' =&gt; array('name' =&gt; 'basic', 'css' =&gt; $path . '/widgets/basic/basic.css')));
?&gt;


And if all is well in the world of copy and paste, you should now have a View with basic stars displayed instead of the number.  If you don't like the basic stars, just look in the widgets directory and you can take your pick of any of the other styles there.