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I think there's no harm in letting the players know the names of the specific regions (Narlmarches, Nomen Heights, etc.). In fact, I'd let each one be known and their general locations to each other with an easy Nature/Recall Knowledge check.
How to handle the hex map depends on how much work you want to put in. I think the only thing I would not do is show the players the complete maps with all the encounters labelled (which you've implied you're not going to do.) Other options are:
- Get a blank hex map and color/label in yourself as your players discover/explore a hex. In 1E, this is what I did. I made the distinction to my players between discovering and exploring a hex by revealing the hex's terrain once they first entered ("discovered") a hex, and then after they put in the 8 hours or whatever of exploring the hex, would any encounters be revealed and the hex be available to claim for the kingdom. This is the most flexible option, but it doesn't utilize Paizo's beautiful maps.
- I don't recall if these are included in the 2E Kingmaker maps, but there exists hex maps of the four Kingmaker areas with no encounter or city labels. I've heard of some GMs covering the unexplored areas of these maps and then labelling important sites in the hexes once encountered.
- Just giving the players the above-mentioned maps and letting them mark it up as they see fit.
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I plan on doing basically the same in 2e as I did for my 1e group. For my players I have laminated copies of the poster maps and I covered each individual hex with a post-it note cut down to the shape/size of the hexes on the map, then removed it when the players fully explored the hex. The post-its were color-coded to a terrain type and represented the out-of-date map(s) the players started with, including the fact that the post-it color didn't always match the underlying terrain. Players could draw on the post-its or the map itself to indicate points of interest and kingdom boundaries, and they had a small card with some sticky-tack on it that they moved around to indicate what hex the party was currently in.
As far as regional divisions go, 1e ran a bit differently as encounters were more or less restricted by book to a single map (as on pg. 628-631 of the AP), so some encounters in 1e (like KL10 and NM4) were much higher CR than their 2e counterpart because the map they were on was in a later book even though they were in the same "region". However, at least for my group, there was a lot less concern that PCs would explore into an area too far outside their level since they only had a single map at a time that they were concerned with, rather than having all four of them available from the start.
Even with all of the maps starting out though I'm not too worried about players going into zones too far outside their level for the first half of the AP, but parts of the later half are concerning, see spoiler for thoughts.
The concern comes around Chapter 7, as zones 11 and 13 and zones 12 and 16 don't really have easily established in-game boundaries. Going back to the map-by-book situation in 1e, the split for the map used in book 4 (Chapter 7) and the one used in book 5 (Chapter 8) is pretty much exactly the edges of those zones, so that's why the zone breaks are there. This is pretty much the one instance I can see where, as the GM, I'm likely to (figuratively or literally) draw a line on the map for the players at a meta level with little or no in-game justification and say "beyond here is above your level, enter at your own risk", especially for the zone 12/16 boundary.
After Chapter 7 I feel like the zone boundaries are mostly back to having justifiable in-game reasons for their boundaries, and so I see it being pretty easy to drop players warnings ahead of time about them.