My personal laptop has pen-input but it's got the rotation feature that the article complains the Surface doesn't. (It says "360-degree" which makes no sense to me; my screen turns 180 degrees and can then be folded down to clip into the laptop keyboard.)

Getting it all running on Linux was doable but definitely not for the faint of heart. But once I did, Xournal was one of the most useful pieces of software for my physics Master's; if the lecturer provides PDFs of lecture slides in advance you can literally just take notes on the slides themselves; or just file them away in a neat folder structure.

Maybe the biggest difference from paper is you can quickly draw a rectangle around part of the preceding equation, and either drag it or copy-and-paste it.

Touch input was nice for browsing and certain games, but was never a huge part of my work.