Picky college laptop search

I am an art student entering my freshmen year of college. My school has no specific computer requirements. I have set my laptop budget at roughly $1200 and I believe I know almost exactly what I want, I just don't know if it quite exists or if I should be considering other options.

The most ideal option I can imagine would be to get a Tablet, so that I can do some of my digital art and animation on the go. My highest priorities in this respect are the touch screen, graphics power, and battery life.
Although I want to be able to have a portable graphics workstation, I'll need less functionality at the coffee shop or in the lecture room than in my personal studio. I want high performance GPU, CPU, and RAM, enough to output high definition resolutions at a good framerate, but I do not actually need a large screen on the device. While in my apartment I can plug it into a larger screen, an external hard drive, and external optical drive, but on the go I only need a limited amount of disk space (enough to store applications and a modest amount of supplementary storage) and a modestly sized touch screen (13" would be just fine). I want the machine to be cool and have a long battery life, so I imagine taking out features like an optical drive would help, but perhaps I am wrong.

Is this a reasonable idea? I'm thinking if I cannot get this then I shall have to get a desktop and a netbook, which would not be inconvenient but would be rather limited. Perhaps within my price range it's possible to get a modest tablet and a higher-performance desktop? If that's the case I've very open to options, but the best way I can figure it is to have the set-up I described above.

Thanks for any help.