Don't bother with gaming, you can always buy an xbox later (and then play on the SP4 using remote play
). When it comes to note-taking, the SP4 is the single best device you can have. I completely replaced pen an paper with my SP3!
If you get the i5 version with 8gb ram and 256gb storage (or better), it should do photo/video editing just fine as well. Any version you get though, make sure to buy a keyboard (any USB keyboard if you don't care for taking notes with keyboard, though I do recommend the surface keyboard as a screen protector and fairly good keyboard) and if you can, a 256GB microSD (wait til black friday, you should be able to get sandisk or samsung UHS3 versions for ~$75 )