With great money comes great wrist action...that sounded weird...anyway, yeah, if you use a small surface you'll have to get use to little less movement of the wrist like you would on a paper and pencil set up, but you'll get used to it soon.
You just have to take a bit more steps between basic shapes and details, takes a bit more time, but it gets done.
What you have to get used to is using keyboard shorcuts and pen, it gets much faster and doesn't really affect you that much when you are able to zoom in and out and move real fast.
As for the tracing over paper, I mainly bought it for that, cause I was too lazy to scan stuff in, but every time I try to do that, the drawing just ends up very weird, it's easier for me to scan the art or just draw by comparison.
The eyes on screen and hand of paper coordination will be no problem if you practice, as Chicky said, it's a learning curve. In a month or two you'll get used to it, same as how you don't look where you're moving the mouse when trying to point somewhere.