I'm using it for my last semester of college, where I'm basically just writing research paper. My laptop's in repair right now, so I've been using this thing nonstop to research articles and take notes. I bought the $9 generic 7" tablet keyboard case, and modified it to make it more secure (
detailed amazon review here). I use Evernote to take notes--the widget and the app are pretty great, and it's nice to have everything up in the cloud.
I wouldn't take notes with just the touchscreen, but if you do, definitely get a keyboard app like SwiftKey. If portability isn't a huge issue, buy a separate bluetooth keyboard. If you'd prefer a portable built-in keyboard case, the generic one works just fine. My hands aren't large, but they aren't tiny, and I can get an average of ~30 WPM (but I type really, really fast on a regular keyboard) . I almost prefer it to lugging around my laptop, but I would hate to use it for taking lecture notes, because professors talk a mile a minute, and a smaller keyboard = more typos.
My opinion is, don't write on it like a piece of paper. You might as well just use a piece of paper, because the end result would be the same. Use an app that automatically syncs notes to an account, like Evernote, so you can access them from anywhere. With Evernote, you can add snapshots, recordings, etc to a note. So, you could take a snapshot of the chalkboard and include it in your notes.
Word-processing apps will allow you to open/edit ppts. So, I use it for note-taking, but it depends on what you're looking for. You won't get great typing speed/accuracy with a small keyboard case, but larger keyboards are less portable.