For anyone that wondered if this little experiment wrecked a brand new guitar, I figured I'd post an update/conclusion.

Everything is fine, and I'm quite pleased with how the neck plays. I like it better than the "stock" finish the neck had. Similar to violin/etc necks, it feels a bit more like wood, but is still smooth and fast. At about a month of daily playing it is holding up well and I haven't run into any problems.

For those with an interest in such things, I'll give a quick run-down of the procedure used. I followed ideas from the section on violins in the book "Making Musical Instruments" by Charles Ford.
I scraped the original finish off the neck and also reshaped the neck slightly, to more closely resemble the radius and etc of my Gibson electric. No sandpaper, just scraper work, and then burnishing the wood with a polished piece of agate. Burnishing eliminates any "fuzzy bits" raised from the grain during scraping and also compresses the outer layer of wood cells tighter, making them a little harder/denser.

The finish is two coats of tung oil, applied by glove method, rather than a brush.

For the glove method, you put on tight fitting nitrile or latex gloves and apply the finish a drop at a time with your gloved fingertips. It gives really good control and allows you to get a very thin coat of finish with little to no waste. I only needed maybe a couple ml of tung oil per coat. Using your fingers allows working the finish into the wood a bit better, as opposed to basically using a brush to flood the surface.

The first coat was allowed to soak in for about 5 min and then any excess is wiped off. That is allowed to dry overnight, and it is basically to seal the wood.

Second coat was applied and wiped very thing with gloves whle still wet. When it got to "finger dry" (not tacky to the touch, but could have still been dented by a fingernail), I buffed it with a soft lint soft cotton cloth (part of an old cotton t-shirt), then let it cure in sunlight for a day to get more to full hardness and then buffed it with an old piece of silk. Then I let it have another day of sunlight and buffed it with silk again before re-stringing, just for good measure.

The result was a sort of satin semigloss finish, thin enough to still feel the wood grain through. If I had wanted it shinier or smoother, I could have polished it with some very fine grit sandpaper. But playing will shine it a bit over time anyway, and I wanted something a bit different than a glassy type of finish (which tung oil isn't the best choice for, anyway).

Fairly simple, so far as finishes go. I've had good results with it on toys, furniture and etc, but hadn't tried it on something like a guitar neck.

I'm including a recent pic, since the first pic on this thread was while the first coat of toung oil was still wet, and the wood was still a bit "raw" looking, since it had just been scraped before the finish was started. The couple days she had in the sun "tanned" the wood slightly, and the completed finish has a bit of glow to it, but is non-glossy.

PS.. To bring this thread back to the topic of violins, this method is what I'll be using to finish the neck on my "in the white" violin project. So this was a good practice/test for that.