It's still kind of slow in practice, like all e-ink. Page turns will take longer than a tablet or of course a book.
It comes with a stylus, but the only note-taking app that works well with it is the built-in one, which is not great though at least it can sync your notes off the device. But standard Android apps that support pen input are unusable.
If you want to read PDFs on an e-ink screen, I think this is probably the best option. You need a much larger screen than Kindles have of course, and the Android ecosystem has some ok apps for PDFs and comics (the Boox has a decent PDF reader but I'd suggest using a different app that syncs).
When it comes down to it, though, I've never really been happy with e-ink. Tablets are just so much faster and more versatile, and for reading in the sun and so forth I'd rather just take a book.