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I was drawing with a mouse, I bought a tablet, I'm still drawing using a mouse.
Short story long, once you get used to it, there's really no difference at least none that I know of. Well aside from pressure point thing, of course. Other than that, nothing takes you more, or less time with mouse and certainly not forever. Curves, straight lines, anything, I can do with mouse whatever you can with tablet in the same time frame.
Concerning tablets, the bigger the better. Really big ones take up lots of space and they're clumsy and whatnot but if you want to be able to draw details with precision and ease, large format is the way to go.