I think the key point in certain scenarios is that you can have mouse stable and resting when you gently press either button or scroll. That's just not possible to do precisely with pen or touchpad. So that's your sliders and selection tools in particular. Right click is just so not great with pen. But anything to do with brushes, pressure sensitive input and they have no substitute.I can’t use it as a day to day pointing device. I just can’t get used to it and find my mouse so much quicker and that’s probably down to using a mouse for the past 30 years or so. The muscle memory is set in for good.
I made exactly the same mistake, my first tablet was an intuos pro large, I soon found out that was overkill, particularly as I do like mapping my space, I map it to about 6ins square, reason being your only moving your hand slightly across the tablet, I moved to a intuos small, and now I use Huion, as they are so much more improved now, and a 3rd of the price of Wacom, and I can't honestly see any difference.A quick tip though. Don’t think bigger1 is better. I made the mistake of buying a large tablet many years ago but this just increases the distance you have to move your hand in order to cover the screen.