Hello!
It is possible to boot from NAND with last mainline kernel and u-boot. Nowtime my cubieboard2 boot from SATA disk with u-boot placed on NAND (without any SD card).
You can enable NAND support in mainline kernel with this guide mainline_nand_howto and compile u-boot with NAND support as described here Compile U-BOOT with NAND
If necessary I can write my steps to make a bootable system without SD in detail.