I still use a Moleskine from time to time, but mostly the iPad, to take notes - especially when doing customer interviews. Yeah, I agree. Starting niche is a good thing. The question is if you want to stay niche or if there's growth potential to other niches and out of niche-dom. [edited for typo]
I like to use my iPad more these days, too, especially cause I'm an evernote fan. Still notes don't look as good as on paper and touch-pens are still not on par for easy writing on screens. A good integration with Evernote good get it out of niche-dom I think. For the big masses paper is still the goto tool at least for another 2 years ;)
I actually did look into the Evernote Smartbook when I had a look at the market & competition for this product. Looks really nice, but I think there's room for improvement & I have an idea or two. But first gotta get proof that there is a market for this
Haven't tried it yet, it seems to be just normal notebook, but with a special space on each page to specify notebook name and tags.
Evernote accelerator would be quite possible, maybe just build a rough app MVP for scanning close to what the moleskine one does?
I prefer writing but every app out there is either too buggy and slow or too bad with wrist detection. Penultimate is closest to perfect but lacks a wrist pad that does not respond to touches. Though its auto sync is unmatchable and so is text search.