FYI, lots of freelance and professional digital artists who draw for a living are using the $50-150 models which don't have displays to great success. I have on

FYI, lots of freelance and professional digital artists who draw for a living are using the $50-150 models which don't have displays to great success. I have one of those (old Wacom Bamboo Capture, no longer sold) and it's more natural than it sounds to make drawing motions with your hand that are rendered on your computer monitor. Unless you have reason to believe the person who made the Christmas request expects a present with $300-$5000+ price tag or specifically wants one with a display, they're probably thinking about the screenless ones (especially if they don't already have a drawing tablet). In that case, they'll likely be very happy with any Wacom model - Wacom Intuos is currently the popular one. As for the price and functionality - the really expensive ones are targeted towards full-time corporate professionals who sit in a room and churn out art all day, and their company will happily shell out $5k for top-tier equipment for them (the artist version of a Bloomberg Terminal haha). The $300-500 ones with screens are priced like regular tablets because that's kind of what they are, just specialized for drawing with a pen. The $50-150 ones focus on the pen input itself and don't deal with the complications of having a screen, making them simple tools that enable digital drawing (it's much more tedious to draw with a mouse than a pen). Their price is the baseline for this category of tooling, as even those basic tablets have a variety of features like pressure sensitivity, high precision, side buttons, etc. which mostly justify the price tag.