If you're taking notes, it's going to be all about the keyboard. [...]
Ignore me. I've just realised that everyone else (including presumably the OP) seems to live in a weird parallel universe where they willingly take notes with a pen. 
I like writing and find it coalesces ideas better, there's something about forming letters and the time it takes that ensures things entangle themselves in your neurones. Plus you can sketch and diagram and doodle, add structure etc. that you frankly can't if you're just typing. I confess I don't understand the people who sit there and type everything as said (or try to) – it's unclear to me what purpose that diligence serves, do they go home and read it? Do they get a prize? I find jotting down or diagramming the import things usually jams it in my brain enough to forget about the notes themselves.
Those are orthogonal issues. Verbatim notes have their place (generally when they're for use by other people), but it's rarely a good strategy for personal reference, unless you've lost the plot and are desperately writing everything down in the hope of achieving enlightenment later. That handwriting is too slow for verbatim notes isn't actually an advantage of handwriting.
I find drawing text by hand to be slow and concentration-intensive, so the idea of having enough brain-cycles left over to absorb the subject matter is completely alien to me. My education benefited greatly when I realised that it was better to pay attention than to diligently write things down (a skill that is strongly encouraged in the later years of primary school
[1]), though that strategy didn't hold up to crap university lecturers dispensing key factoids through the media of droning audio or overhead projector scribble. For that (drifting vaguely on-topic) I discovered the Psion 5: A keyboard I could touch type on at over three times my handwriting speed, with the option of switching to inline scribbling on the screen with the stylus for simple diagrams (though the low pixel count meant that for anything complex or longer equations with scary integrals and things, paper was my preferred option). A modern tablet with non-shit backlight, decent keyboard, battery life, camera
[2] *and* proper pen support would have been awesome.
If your brain can do the physical writing on autopilot (I assume it's like finding the keys on a keyboard or riding a bike or whatever) then great, I can see how that might help, just don't fall into the trap of assuming that's how it works for everyone. Indeed, some people have to use their entire brain just to do the hearing part (which is why they benefit from having someone else doing the notes for them).
[1] There may well have been prizes, but my chances of winning would have been about as likely as winning at sportsball.
[2] For backing up blackboards full of semi-legible mathematics. In my PSO days the Malaysian students with cheap (in relative terms) DSLRs had only just worked this out.
