Perhaps for most people they are toys, so I don't really want to disagree
with you, but for me personally it would be a very useful tool, if I could
get one with a sufficiently accurate touch screen and stylus. I've tried out
a Wacom Cintiq years ago and the parallax in the thick glass was too much for
accurate drawing, and the icons too small. Maybe they've improved. Being
able to do gestural drawing right on the screen would be terrific.
I'd also like to have a large one as an e-reader, as my small e-reader isn't
good for PDFs. As it is, I tend to print out academic papers and highlight
and make notes on them manually. It would save a lot of paper if I could do
this digitally, and physically highlighting and writing in margins is very
different to navigating with a mouse and typing a linked note in an addon.
As a user, my focus has always been on open source (and now Free) software
and using whatever workaround, nonfree drivers etc to make things work: but
it's becoming very apparent that as users we really need to focus on hardware
first. The two go hand-in-hand. On every Linux forum everywhere you see
endless threads about getting XYZ piece of hardware to work with Linux. It's
all backwards! If we keep buying nonfree hardware, what motivation do
manufacturers have to free their drivers?
