There was nothing traditional about Nerada at all. Why assume traditional shields? And even if you go with Countdown's Borg tech idea, the Borg don't use traditional shields, either. Borg transport inhibitors appear to be seperate from their defensive subspace field.
It's a slippery slope. For Kirk's plan to work the Narada must never exceed warp 4 and yet (even ignoring possible Borginess) it is never stated that the ship's propulsion has been damaged. We know they travelled slow to give them time to interrogate Pike but even so, Kirk is so lucky that they didn't decide to travel at a standard cruising speed of Warp 6, which is still plenty slow enough to do what needs to be done (warp 4 is just embarassing - even Archer could travel that fast).
It would take days to reach Earth from Vulcan at low warp. This is never stated but it takes minutes at high warp and it must take proportionately longer at lower warp. Faster ships can beat the Narada to Earth from further away. It is never stated that there are no ships at all within several days' travel of Earth (although we all know there never are), only that the fleet is away. It would have been more logical to send encrypted signals to ships within range to beat the Narada to Earth at high warp and carry out Kirk's plan. In failing to do so Kirk takes a huge risk that the Narada will not speed up largely due to his ego. We have to assume they tried to contact other ships and there are none. We also have to assume that there is some reason why the can't signal the fleet (or at least start the process by sending a message to a subspace relay) using their long range communications or the communications array on Delta Vega since nobody attempts to do so on camera.
For Kirk's plan to work, the Narada, in spite of its superior technology must have no shields raised, and be incapable of detecting both an incoming scan from the Enterprise, and an incoming transport. TOS tech might be this lame but 24th century has this stuff as standard.
If either Kirk or Spock is captured or killed, the plan fails. Neither Kirk nor Spock reads Romulan but Spock claims he can blag it, which I'm sure is a risk you'd want to take with a whole planet at stake. Oh wait, that's right, Kirk was originally going in on his own until Spock volunteered...
They make a similar mistake to Troi in her TNG exam. Cannon fodder should be sacrificed to save a planet. A security team should have been beamed in to take the bridge at the same time as the incursion below decks. They might succeed, they might be cut to pieces, or they could detonate explosives to take out the bridge and slow the ship down. Wasting their window to beam in only two crew was bonkers. Fair enough if something goes wrong with that plan leading to the situation we saw. But for that to be the plan all along...
Uhura or someone who can speak Romulan should have been included witht the incursion team, as should someone medically trained in case Pike needed assistance. A security escort should also have beamed in with them. A shame that Uhura and Chapel could have been given some action there.
All the crew should be willing to die to save Earth. Kirk's plan is on par with Troi. Do it all himself and hope it might work. I hope they smarten up these elemetns in the next one.
