As the OP definitely wants the pen, I think the Note 8 remains the only game in town, and a great one at that. I have always been a screen resolution fanatic, but at 8" and with the excellent colors, brightness and contrast of it's screen, I find the Note 8's 1200 x 800 surprisingly well suited. I own a 2013 Nexus 7 and I do not find the higher resolution at this size to be of much benefit - plus it has highly inaccurate colors and poor saturation.
I've read this as well, but I own the Note 8 specifically for its size, so no 10" tablet would suit me better, no matter how good the screen. It does have a few extra S pen tricks, but nothing game-changing, and Samsung is likely to make them available to this generation of Note products.
What he said ^
Really, the Note 8 is in a class by itself and dpis greater than 200 (this is 189) are of very limited value for any conceivable use of this tablet. It's not the tablet you buy primarily for watching videos, but the screen handles them very nicely when you want to. The S Pen - a Wacom app - is as good as it gets at this size/price level whether for note taking, input by hand converted to digitial (Samsung does this almost as well as Windows) or even art within its size limits. The only products that would make me trade up would be a Win 8.1 at this size with an excellent active digitizer. The Dell Venue 8 Pro comes pretty close, but the pen is a fail as of now. I'm sure I will go for Samsung's replacement of this model, likely due out in Feb/Mar. I also think that Dell/Synaptics will improve the working of its active pen and that Samsung is likely to put out a W8.1 tablet with S pen and others may follow suit - with Wacom (S Pen, Surface Pro, Lenovo (device?) or N-trig (Sony Duo, others). The keys here are: 8" form factor, well under 1 lb weight, active digitizer with well functioning pen and price points between $250 and $500. Oh yeah, and screens will no doubt all be at least FHD - hopefully not more.
Bottom line: if you don't need to use One Note in full (vs. Android partial version) the Note 8 is the one to beat now, price or resolution be damned. The space, I predict, will get hot as this is a wonderful companion form factor - 7" is too small and 10" is too big. Finally, there are deals to be found on the Note 8 and they will get better as the replacement is nearing. I was really lucky and got mine as an "open box" for $235.
Sorry for going on so long. I love this product and I think it is widely misperceived and direct comparisons to the Nexus 7 or Mini 2 are inappropriate and show lack of knowledge of what makes this product so special.