Answers to a few of your questions:
1. You don't need much CPU at all, especially if you are not doing software RAID calculations.
2. When using Linux, you use a program called Samba to present CIFS/SMB shares, which are the formats that windows looks for as network shares.
It is actually extremely easy to install something like Ubuntu or CentOS, or even a much much lighter weight variant of linux, and run a NAS from it. How many drives do you want to use? What raid levels? Backup strategy for the NAS? recovery strategy for the NAS? All questions you will probably want to think about before building your own, or even buying a larger one.
Keep in mind the large "powerful" NAS devices on the market, the QNAP's and Synology's, etc. are all just dual-core Atom CPU's with 1-3GB of RAM and 1-2GB of flash memory storage for the linux OS they run.
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