Battle of the budget tablets, looking for thoughts on a few specific models

I'm looking for a low-end tablet to take with me to a convention for editing and uploading photos, as well as a basic computing device for beyond that. Under $300 is where I'm looking to stay, and I prefer the 7-9" screen size.

Some of the options I've been looking at are the Archos G80 9, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, and the Kindle Fire. I've also been considering the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which you can find for around $270 refurbished.

Pretty sure I'm not really interested in the Fire due to its lack of Honycomb / ICS, but I'm not all too familiar with the the power of the chipsets inside the other tabs and how they compare with each other.

As far as I know, the G80 uses an unspecified 1 Ghz dual core Cortex A8. Its the oldest of the bunch, but, since I work at Staples, I can get it for around $160, pretty tempting.

Then there's the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which runs a 1.2 Ghz Exynos chip. How much performance increase are we talking about from that and double the RAM from 512 MB to 1 GB? Enough to justify a $110 price hike?

And then, I believe I read that the 'Tab 2 7.0 is running a Tegra 2. Isn't that similar in performance to the G80's hardware? Is it even worth considering when it would be almost as expensive as a refurb Tab Plus?

Thanks for any advice you can give, I'm new to Android tablets so I don't have a strong grip around the intimate details yet!

 

Wow...the Exynos must have some serious balls then...may have to jump on the Tab Plus...it must totally smoke a Tegra 2 performance-wise...

Is it the GPU that makes it so much faster? I dunno how the CPU's compare spec for spec but there's obviously more than clockspeed going on here XD