When I looked at it a few months ago: "$279? That's not too bad.. oh wait, that's for refurb. $299 new. Okay, still good. Wait what.. $129 for the pen, too? Hang on... $179 for the cover/case?!"
One thing about the Remarkable is that it, like many other eink tablets uses a Wacom EMR layer so almost any third party Wacom pen should work ($25-50). The Lamy Al-star is pretty good and available worldwide. I like the Staedtler Noris jumbo pen as well (although the nib is significantly softer/rubberier so it might not appeal to everyone). My favorite pen atm, which might not be available globally, is the Wacom CP20206BZ - it's a stylus embedded in a wooden Mitsubishi Hi-Uni shell, and it feels awesome in the hand.
I was a Remarkable 1 early adopter and am grandfathered in on their cloud plan but I actually ended up not using it so much (their software sucked for most of the device lifetime). A couple years ago I ended up switching to a Boox Note 3 instead of a RM2 and it's responsive enough for me (the competition mostly caught up on latency) and as a full Android system, it's much more functional for me. It's been easier for me to keep my PDFs/papers in sync, I can read all my Kobo and Kindle books, and it's fine for notetaking. There's a small niche of YouTubers that do in depth reviews of various eink tablets (My Deep Guide is probably the most in depth) which I'd recommend for anyone in the market.
I don't have an RM2 so I can't say for sure, there might be some differences w/ button compatibility or calibration, but from what I've seen online and w/ various reviews, most of the different pens should all be interchangeable if they are using Wacom EMR.
> The new Marker and Marker Plus have been designed specifically to work in conjunction with reMarkable 2’s second-generation CANVAS display. We can therefore not guarantee an optimal experience if used with the reMarkable 1.
Talk about nickle and diming you.