I would rather have a touch laptop for university. When I was in university (2004-2008), it was really tough to find touch-devices, but once in a while you'd spot someone with one.
University for me was all about taking notes. I'd either write down whatever my calculus prof put on the chalkboard, or print out the 100s of pages of slides the prof would post before classes started and write notes on those slides. It would have made my backpack was lighter if I had a touch-laptop, then I could write directly on the laptop and augment the PDFs with my own hand-writing/diagrams/equations. Having your texts in PDF format would make it even lighter.
If you're in a math/science field, then you'll find that you won't be doing any typing. All of the crazy notations/diagrams/symbols we use make a keyboard completely ineffective. I remember spending hours "digitizing" my notes with MS Equation 3.0.
I got one of these in december, and I love it (convertible laptop/tablet).
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-12-9q33/pd
I got the one with the i5 1.6 GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 128 GB SSD. The thing was only 700 USD. I threw Ubuntu-Unity on there and it works great with an 8 second boot time. 3-finger screen gestures are supported, two-finger touchpad scroll works (assuming you get the latest linux kernel). The only thing I can't get on Ubuntu is the auto-rotate (no one can seem to figure out how to get the accelerometer data). So really, it's a laptop which can become a tablet when convenient.