I went last year. My friend and I caught the bus from Arequipa through to Nazca overnight, arriving early morning (around 7). The town itself is fairly non-descript, just full of hagglers telling you they've run out of Avgas and the like to try and charge you to stay a day.
From the ground you can't really get to the glyphs, as they're in the desert. The closest you can get is along the desert highway, where a viewing tower has been built. But it's really not very high - we drove past it in the bus as we left town.
However, anyone who is going there does the flight, which was trivial to organise. We hopped off the bus, got a taxi to the airport, questioned all operators for prices etc (you can talk some of them down), and were on a flight at 10am for 30 min. You get exactly the views you'd expect, and it was fantastic - the pilots are very good at showing both sides of the plane the same thing with banks and turns over the glyphs.
As you come back to the airport you get a good view of the town, and there's really not much else to do there. I wouldn't have minded seeing the old aqueducts, but it'd have required a nights stay as well, so we headed on to Lima instead.
By 11am we were back at the bus terminal to buy our tickets for the bus out of town an hour later.