Great Tablet Tools and the Toshiba M205-S810
Scott Hanselman has a nice list of essential tools for the Tablet, and ditto on the love for the M205-S810:
I'd add XPSP2 to the list. The improvements in recognition and the pop-up entry box were like getting a brand new tablet. And PowerPoint (of all things) is like a brand new app on the tablet; the ability to download a presentation and ink it up with notes during a session turns it from handy to killer. In the cool column, I dig My Font Tool for TabletPC. It turns your handwriting into a TrueType font, say no more.
With this particular tablet, one of my few gripes was that power on DVD playback was spotty. The drive has it's own built-in battery, so why didn't the thing work without being plugged in? The answer turned out to be that the cable wasn't providing proper USB power -- as soon as I switched to another USB cable (one that came with an external HDD), the CD/DVD drive works great.