Here's a link to a somewhat recent-ish post about the tablet I purchased about half a year ago. I still love the thing, though my next tablet I might go for something with more power for sure. Surprisingly it runs Photoshop CS3 more smoothly than Cosmigo ProMotion, just because of the processor speed slowing down some drawing modes like symmetry painting. But I digress..
If you can find a tablet in your range that has capacitive pen input that functions alongside multi-touch functions, though I don't think they would work simeltaneously (correct me if I'm wrong though). Usually a tablet that doesn't ignore any touch input when the pen is present leads to you smearing unwanted drawing marks whenever your wrist is resting on the screen to draw.
Having capacitive pen input is pretty valuable though, even for pixel art. Sure, you can live without it, but if you do use photoshop you can take advantage of that pressure sensitively very nicely.
Also, photoshop DOES play nicely with pixel art, despite what a lot of people think - they're just not using the right tools or unchecking things like "anti-alias" on selection tools. If you change the scaling method in the general options to nearest neighbor, the scaling tools will never blur your pieces. If you use the paint bucket tool or the selection tools with '0' tolerance setting and 'anti-alias' unchecked, they will work just as you would expect them to in a pixel art program. And lastly, use the 'pencil' tool instead of the 'brush' tool (click and hold down on the brush tool button until the menu pulls out and select the pencil) and any size or shape brush you draw with will have crisp, solid, pixelly edges. You can also just turn off pressure sensitivity in the brush options panel under shape dynamics if it's ever interfering with your desired results.
Might also consider either getting a peripheral keyboard, or some type of programmable device that you can set hotkeys to just so you can keep your tools and shortcuts that you use often available in a snap instead of having to rely on manually using menus with the pointer if the tablet you end up getting does not have any programmable side buttons to work with. If you're on the go it won't always be practical to use stuff that plugs into it, but when you are sitting down somewhere wanting to draw, it helps out a lot to use a miniature keyboard or something instead of doing your typing on an on-screen keyboard. Some tablets do have built-in keyboards though - a lot of them are built very differently though so it's all subject to what you go with. Some just look like laptops that you can write on and swivel the screen around backwards and fold down. Some are just the screens with some buttons (like the one I have) on the sides.
I think if you have something running windows vista or windows 7, there might be some programmable 'gestures' you can learn and set up that are kind of like wrist motions/pen flicks that you can do to execute things like Undo or whatever you might want to do.
A lot of it is just looking at it with the mindset of figuring out what features will be the most important for what you want to get out of the machine. Is the screen size going to be an issue with the programs you plan to use? Do you want something with a lot of processing power and memory? Is a hard-wired keyboard option going to be integral? Do these pants make me look fat? Can I afford this 34" quad-core 8GB RAM keyboard-having skinny-pants-making windows 7 tablet that I just decided I needed based on the previous questionnaire answers?
It is a very gratifying purchase; one that will really make you appreciate the mobility as you curl up in a chair and draw straight on the screen as if it were a sketch pad that has built-in easy access to
porn email and tabbed up picture references. But keep in mind that you want to focus on just getting the features most important to you, or accepting that you might not need it to be as powerful and full-featured as you might think you want, in the interest of cost, because remember that you probably have another desktop PC or laptop that can handle other workloads better and more comfortably. Get something that you will cater to your ability to just draw and do pixel art without all the fuss and stationary-ness of other machines, but will be able to run the programs you need most.
Also, one thing to remember, is to get info on the included pen/stylus/digitizer that the tablet will use, if the information is available. The default pen my tablet came with only had one side button and the pen tip, but I was able to find a compatible pen (that was meant to be used with a competitor brand of tablet, oddly enough) that had an eraser end, the tip, and two side buttons. With some 3rd party drivers provided by Wacom, it enabled the computer to use it with all buttons programmable and the pressure sensitivity unlocked (the computer didn't really pick up on it in photoshop until I installed those drivers).
Hope that helps conflict your decision even more by making you think about features to consider
