It depends a bit on what you want... (Score 5, Informative)

My company is currently evaluating Tablet PCs as a potential platform for one of our software products. We have 5 of them, most from different vendors. We have a couple that are slate only, and a couple that are convertible. I'm one of the primary designers for the product, so I've been using a Toshiba M200 for a few weeks now.

My initial impression has been favorable, though you're right on in your assessment that tablets are still in their infancy. Microsoft's handwriting recognition is excellent, definitely the best I've seen. They also have some limited support for gesture and shape recognition, though they don't appear to be using them for much at the moment.

As far as I can tell, there is not yet a "killer app" for the tablet pc platform. The only thing that comes close is OneNote, which is pretty damned cool, but not really worth the extra money, imo. The tablet platform still has quite a few warts, the biggest being the lack of decent integration with existing apps. MS's solution to ink input for legacy apps is a rather clunky keyboard/writing area applet that sits above the task bar and transmits your handwriting as text to selected text input controls after a short delay. I suspect that this will get better and better with future revisions of the tablet pc operating system services.

As for the hardware, the Toshiba is a nice machine. It's fast, being Centrino based, though not as fast as some of the other Pentium M machines out there because they've pushed it as far in the battery life conservation direction as possible. Mine gets about 4 - 5 hours under normal conditions. The display is good, and I like the high resolution (1400 x 1050). The graphics accelerator is middle of the road for current laptops. Overall performance is decent, though noticably slower than my Thinkpad T40p.

That said, I do have a few gripes with this particular model. It's much larger than you might expect, especially given that it has a curiously cramped keyboard. It's very thick, and fairly heavy for a tablet. I vastly prefer the form factor of my T40. It is, however, leaps and bounds above the 1st gen HP/Compaq tablet we have, which was based on a suck-ass tranmeta processor and just felt cheesy as hell. Apparently the newer ones are much better.

As for competitors, we have one of the Motion Computing slates, which definitely wins in terms of sex appeal. It's thin, good industrial design, and very appealing. I haven't had a chance to play with it, though, and I think I would sorely miss the keyboard in short order.

To summarize, I think my advice would definitely be NOT to buy a tablet right now . For the extra money, you can get an absolutely kick ass notebook that really blows the tablet away in terms of overall capabilities. I like my tablet, but I like my T40 even more. It's much friendlier to use, and I find myself wishing that I were typing when I take notes on the tablet.

If you just have to have the tablet because of the cool factor, make sure you have an opportunity to play with both types (slate and convertible) before you take the plunge. Buying a convertible is a concession to practicality. When you stop using the tablet features after the first month, at least you still have a decent laptop to use. With the slate, you're pretty screwed unless you use the docking station all the time.

- adam