My vote is for SwiftKey's long-press feature as mentioned above.
And unlike the stock keyboard, when you do a shift in SwiftKey, you get a nice keypad layout as opposed to the "across the top" layout making numeric entry much simpler and quicker.
Oh, and personally, I prefer the PHONE version on my Nexus 7 over the TABLET version. It's more compact yet still very usable, and provides a row of Arrow Keys which appears to be missing from the Tablet version.