i heard the Bamboo sucks, and it looks to be the go-to for cheap tablets.
i am borrowing a Intuous 4 medium, and i love it so damn hard. i am a freelance artist (degree in painting) and i drug my feet forever about even trying digital painting/drawing. something was really offputting about the whole thing. then my friend let me borrow her intuous and holy cow. it’s all the fun parts of painting minus the cleaning and bullshit. and the results look nice.
all that said, it might be she and i have different needs, so take this for what it’s worth. the Intuous 4 has an ipod style wheel and various buttons to the left (or right however you orient it) that i never, ever eveeeeer use. i paint in photoshop and find it much easier to use the quick-keys w my non-pen hand than to jump over to the other tablet controls.
i am looking to buy my own, and i will probably buy one used, maybe an older Intuous. bear in mind they have various sizes (small, medium which i find pretty perfect, large and XL). each size is the workspace, and the smaller, the better for me. it means less arm movement and less fatigue.
the newer intuous has more bells and whistles than even the 4, so i might look at a used 3 medium.
i know they make a lot of no-brand and low-end drawing tablets, but if the Wiacom Bamboo is crap compared to their Intuous line, i would be skeptical to buy anything lesser than a Wiacom at all.
the input is very weird at first anyway, and there’s a bit of a frustrating tech-hurdle just to get use to the mechanics of pen-input cursor movement and all it does, and how it translates from how a real pen functions and all that. if there were glitches or poor quality transposition hardware involved too (via cheaper units), i think i’d lose my everloving mind.
so in short: i’d get a nice new or used intuous 2 or 3.
final thought:
i know a photographer who bought one just for exactly what you are talking about. she went w the intuous 4 small and got it for around $168 from a private seller on ebay. it was still in the factory box but wasn’t NEW new as the owner played on it a few times. new enough, tho.