Turns out that an Android tablet (actually any phone) can be made into an actually-useful full-fledged Linux workstation, without rooting it.
By actually-useful, I mean something that a power-user will be able to use. By power-user, I mean roughly somebody who does most of his work in the command line and/or editors, but in a graphical environment.
There is no way around the fact that GUI-based tools developed for a desktop system will be unusable on touch interfaces. For one, UI elements are simply too many and too close together.
Command-line tools are quite another story. Lots of scientific and development workflows rely on some form of console or editor, plus an occasional preview - say a plot, or rendered LaTeX output. The key here is the ability to easily switch windows, and that they appear with sensible defaults that don't force us to rearrange them every time.