So here's a review of OneNote, where the author apparently used it only on a desktop, and never even mentions ink, even though he refers to it as a "necessity on a Tablet PC".
Impressively enough, the author calls OneNote "one of the most mature software packages ever to come out of Redmond. It has been carefully designed all the way down to its intuitive structure. It is perhaps the neatest and most elegant thing Microsoft has ever made, and it's only in its first edition." High praise, considering the rest of the criticisms in the article. No writing or drawing experiences are offered, because those are limited to "one of those pen-based tablets".
I found this bit a little surprising:
"That said, OneNote also has a limit to the length of each note. If a note gets out of hand, you must at some point open a new note and continue, unlike in Word, which just keeps expanding the number of pages. Perhaps this is for the best, because brevity is a valuable commodity in note-taking, and having OneNote force brevity on you could be beneficial in the long run. Novelists suddenly clobbered by the muse should perhaps resort to a good word processor instead of trying to get a whole chapter into a single text container."
OneNote has a page length limit? I guess I don't really write very long notes then. Or is it a limit on the length of a text container? A single OneNote page wouldn't always be a single container, especially if you also combined it with ink. But I really never caught any other mention of a such a limit? Are heavy OneNote users running out of writing space?
And the complaint about a lack of protection against deleting documents is a little weak as well. Apart from having its own Deleted Pages area, OneNote is one of very few applications that also have a customizable backup mechanism. That's certainly better than nothing.
The conclusion?
"One could ultimately feel that OneNote will lose to pencil and paper, if only because they are so much physically lighter (and cheaper) than even the lightest Tablet PC. And of course, one can't make paper airplanes out of the pages of OneNote."
What can you say? Well, maybe that OneNote is not intended to replace pen and paper. Not directly anyway. Nothing will really completely compete with that traditional medium. But OneNote does a really good job in approximating the feel of pen and paper when you are not using it - on a Tablet PC. Ultimately, OneNote's fortunes will probably rise and fall along with the success of Tablet PCs. And those will do well enough.
Related... [Tabula PC] 
