I am a big fan of my Framework laptop. It is super easily upgradable and repairable so should last a good while. They are a little sold out of all of their old models so they only have pre-orders right now. They have options for a 13th gen i5 and a Ryzen 5 that both start at $850. The intel ones ship sooner and are have cheaper DDR4 RAM (vs DDR5 for Ryzen). The $850 is "base", an i5 configured with 16g of RAM, a 500gb SSD, and no OS (assuming you'll use linux or already own windows) is just under $1100. You can go as low as just over $1k for 8g of ram and 250g SSD.
If you're concerned with cost they do have refurbished 12th-gen i5s in stock now for $720, but you'll need to buy RAM and an SSD (which if buying from them would bring your total to $820 for 8g of RAM and 250g of SSD).
I can't comment on the tablet/pen stuff. I have never owned a laptop that does that. It might be worth it if you do drawing or whiteboarding and stuff, but those are the only people I know of that actually use that sort of stuff.
Be careful with the Intel laptop chips and make sure you understand what you're getting. My work laptop has an i7 with 12 "cores" but it's 10 of the low powered e-cores and 2 of the hyperthreaded p- cores, so for heavy applications (like compiling) it's a glorified dual core i3.
Yeah, my current one is 11th gen, just before they started doing that, so I don't know how good or bad the "efficiency" cores are or if the power savings is worth it.
Under load it can get pretty hot, might be better with a less power hungry processor (I've got an i7). Battery is reasonable 4-5ish hours (55wh and they recently announced a drop-in replacement with better chemistry that is 61wh) with what I would consider to be "normal" usage in Windows 10 including WSL, browsing, running the software I am working on (usually node or golang), etc. It's also better if I lower my screen brightness, but I usually keep it pretty high/max.