Honestly, I’m baffled by the tablet market. Everyone puts out underpowered devices. Even Google! How can you, in good faith, justify a tablet having a slower processor and less memory than a phone while trying to advertise it as the superior device, perfect for editing and whatnot?
Time to DIY!
Waveshare touchscreen for pi, 1200x800 is a good price and for home assistant that is fine. $70/75 for 8inch/10.1inch version. (10.1DP-CAPLCD)
Raspberry pi 3/4/5 can mount directly on the back of it. For whatever outrageous price Pis are now. (Around here, a 4B/4GB is 60€.
Wave share PoE hat for $20
Assemble it like Lego, put it in a wooden frame or 3D print, done. Around 160 USD plus shipping for a full build of a POE battery-less touchscreen display that runs full Linux of whatever flavor. (And is quite overkill as far as power).
You could probably do it even cheaper with an orange pi zero 3 with a PoE to USB-C converter or a Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro IoT which has PoE built in.
It is cheaper than a tablet and strips out the useless things like a battery, camera, really high DPI display, LTE radios, etc… For a simple home assistant kiosk.
But yeah, epaper displays are 3x the display cost without touchscreen. Though in my opinion, epaper is better for static non-interactive sensor display which can run on battery with an MCU for almost no power because it only has to update once an hour or so.