A mega nerd for pulling out a 7 by 6 inch touchpad with a pen next to your laptop? They're not talking about a full fat Wacom tablet, and besides, it's really not that hard to write on a screen vs a tablet, in some cases even better because your hands don't cover parts of it up (I have both an iPad with a pencil and a Wacom).

Plus on macOS you can easily use note taking apps with the Wacom touchpad that then digitize the text to make it searchable.

A Huion Kamvas then, still way cheaper than an iPad.

Again it doesn't bother me for certain ratios of time thinking:writing.

Like a hard sudoku puzzle is fine, you typically write one symbol every few minutes.

But for notetaking where its a symbol every second, yes to me its terrible.

Not really, it works just fine and you don't obscure the screen with your hand.

Not really, sure it is easier to find your cursor but that is not very hard using an external tablet, and you get much better ergonomics plus you can see what is under your hand.