What's the confusion? Slap on Nova Launcher and Zooper Widget, make it look like whatever you want.

Samsung Tabs also do not get much ROM development, look at all their flagship tablets.

If you want to CONSUME content, any tablet will do, and the X1 is a very nice candidate, best 7" IMHO and a few others here. LTE is fantastic and so is battery life.

However in terms of CREATING content, you NEED a physical keyboard to do it properly otherwise it is very tedious.

I do use the X1 for Excel and PDFs, and it works ok but it's hard to do complex formulas or whatnot.

Some tasks are still better on a full blown PC/notebook.