What are the issues with overriding nodes with views? I am thinking that I have a couple of content types that views would be better at displaying my content. e.g. If an image field is blank, show this default image (this is only a basic example where a view would be preferred over Drupal's default node. i.e. I want to create a view with the node id as an argument and set the views page path to node/%. Are there any drawbacks to this?
You could, however, do something like this in node.tpl.php:

&lt;?php if ($node-&gt;type=='FANCYTYPE'): ?&gt;
  &lt;?php print views_embed_view('name_of_fancy_view', 'default', $node-&gt;nid); ?&gt;
&lt;?php else: ?&gt;
  // the rest of the normal node.tpl.php stuff here
&lt;?php endif; ?&gt;


or create a node-TYPE.tpl.php (D6) or node--TYPE.tpl.php (D7) with just the Views logic inside.