Right, so firstly forget any advice you've been given in this thread so far, it looks like the people here have never used a decent budget tablet (in fact I know one who definitely hasn't). While it is true that 99% of tablets under £100 are garbage there are a few pretty good ones, normally based around the Allwinner A10 (ARM A8-Cortex and Mali-400 GPU). These are tablets like the Teclast P76ti, the Ainol Novo Advanced and Elf). It's important to note that you should't buy an Ainol Novo Paladin with a MIPS processor as barely any apps work on it.
You'll find these tablets will handle most tasks you throw at them, games, video, browsing, e-books (Kindle etc), email. They are all multipoint capacative screens and there is a fantastic ROM community growing around the Allwinner A10 at Slatedroid and Tablet Republic. I use a Teclast P76ti or Ainol Novo Elf in my car headrest for playing kid's videos on longer journeys and they are ideal for tasks like this.
I know it's always hard to know whether someone is 'bigging up' a product just because they have it, but I also have an HTC Flyer, HP Touchpad, Apple iPad 2, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy S2 so that is certainly not the case with me and I have a great deal of experience with device testing due to my job.
If you have any questions or apps you want me to try and video for you on a Teclast or Elf let me know and I hope this advice is more useful than "they're crap, but I can't explain why in any detail".