After talking with some folks I went home and tried some stuff. I upgraded to Manga Studio 5.0.4 and wasn't getting the drawing lag I saw before. It still has the "hover lag" but that's just annoying not a deal breaker. I tried a bunch of different settings in Photoshop that people recommended and still could not get rid of the drawing lag. I'll draw another strip on it this week (this time using Manga Studio) and let you know how it goes. It seems like the majority of my frustration was coming from Photoshop and not the Surface which is good. Manga Studio is my preferred drawing program anyway but I figured the new Photoshop with its fancy tablet mode would be cool to try. To be totally fair the tablet mode in the new PS must be turned ion under "experimental features". So uh... maybe that stuff isn't quite ready for prime time.
-Gabe out