Creating an attractive and practical hybrid laptop shouldn't be all that difficult. Yet as history has proven, budget-minded systems often get the short end of the stick in the design department and end up with more shortcomings than actual features.

HP's new Pavilion X2 hybrid is one of the rare exceptions.

The device carries a 10.1-inch 1080p IPS touchscreen display and is powered by a quad-core Intel Atom processor, 2GB of memory and your choice of 32GB or 64GB of internal storage. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity come standard. Not terribly impressive, right? Stick with me.

The slate comes loaded with a full-size USB 2.0 port, a microHDMI connection, a microSD card slot and a USB Type-C connection. The latter is only found on a handful of systems thus far and is used to charge the Pavilion X2. According to HP, the system is good for more than 10 hours of runtime between charges.

The tablet is held onto its keyboard dock using a spiffy magnetic latch. Based on multiple first-hand encounters, this is one of the strong points of the entire system.

The 2015 HP Pavilion X2 hybrid will go on sale July 21 in red, white and silver color schemes with Windows 8 pre-installed. Upgrading to Windows 10 on July 29 should prove to be a painless experience.

Perhaps the best part about the HP Pavilion X2 is its price - $299 for the 32GB model which also includes a one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365.