2DMention is in his thirties, lives with his parents and finds terms like "Gaylo Reach-around" hilarious.
If you are picking between an iPad or MacBook pro, I would definitely go with the iPad. Not only would you save a ton of money, I use it for everything you need to do and more, and I can't imagine grad school without it.
For reading and research, iAnnotate is the best pdf annotation app. You can easily tab up PDFs, highlight, underline, write notes on documents and organize everything into folders.
For note taking, I just use Pages, but there are a lot of note specific apps. Stuff that will record lectures and let you write with your finger, etc... but Pages works fine for me.
What email service do you use? Gmail has always worked fine with my iPad and I've never once had a problem.
I'm also assuming you have a computer at home you can sync this to, right?