Wacom Tablet

I'm thinking about getting a Wacom graphics tablet.  I'm not a visual artist at all, but now that I am engaged in long-distance collaboration, the ability to sketch directly into digital form would be indispensable.  Especially since I don't have a scanner with which I could quickly digitize sketches on paper.  Good-sized ones are a few hundred bucks...but I'm about to get a nice fat tax refund from the IRS, so maybe I can spend some of that on a tablet.  We'll see.