> when you can read and write Japanese on it the deal is basically made

Why is this the deal maker? I do not read/write japanese so maybe I am missing something obvious.[^1] Is writing/reading japanese with pen/pencil and paper difficult? Is there something that differentiates Japanese reading/writing from Korean? Have there been other tablets that worked with western scripts but not Japanese?

[^1]: I am assuming we are not talking about handwriting recognition.

Japanese (and Chinese) features intricate ideograms with up to (I think) 22 strokes per character. It's not the language itself, so much as the fact that the display and touch-sensor resolution is good enough to be competitive with paper. Other handwriting platforms I've looked at in the past required writing on a larger-than-natural scale or comparatively slowly (often because of OCR requirements, which are not relevant here, but also because at the time display resolutions were comparatively low). What I saw in the video was natural handwriting speed and good registration with good resolution, which to me passes a threshold of usability that only paper has met up to now.

I have no idea what the GP meant, but fwiw: Korean is written using an alphabet not entirely unlike Latin (for the purpose of this discussion), except that when written, several letters are layed out together in syllabic blocks.

Those blocks appear superficially similar to the characters used to write Chinese languages and much of Japanese. However these are logograms, that is each character represents a whole word (simplfying again - in truth many of these characters can be broken apart into components, but they're not assembled from phonograms like Latin or Korean characters; further, Japanese writing also uses a set of phonograms in addition to and together with the logograms).

Ultimately this means the Korean blocks are much more regular, since they're all composed from the same small repertoire of individual characters, with not even all that much complexity to kerning/ligature-like behavior, though font systems usually work with precomposed blocks instead of doing on the fly character composition anyway. Their shape complexity/stroke density is also lower. And handwriting recognition is massively simpler for all of those reasons.

Downvoted for asking a legitimate question. Who does that? I could care less about the karma but in light of the pending comments change this is very troublesome.

I gave you an extra upvote. I hate it when that happens and thought your question was entirely legitimate - my original comment was a bit vague.

How many downvotes was it?

It is possible it was a fat-fingered upvote.

Is flexibility a particularly useful feature for lawyers? I've always kind of thought that flexibility was one of the shortcomings of paper in most situations involving writing, hence clipboards.

The E-ink screen is flexible. The Sony DPTS1 Digital Paper reader is not flexible: the screen is held in a plastic frame.

Flexibility is a feature. What requires clipboards is a lack of strength. Flexibility is what allows paper to bend and not break when you overcome its strength by flapping it around.

Flexibility ought to allow for lighter devices, as they won't need to be built as strongly to avoid breaking.