I haven't seen much here outside of the academic scenario, but it impresses me how different a business meeting notes need is from the academic environment.

In a business meeting, I'm not aiming to memorize the dictated information. Instead, I am chronicling conversations as they happen, flagging issues, and generating "to-dos". Since I'm not aiming to memorize, and access to previous meeting notes is often critical, the pen-and-paper brigade falls on deaf ears: I barely have the time to attend this meeting once; "reliving" it later to transcribe my notes to more permanent storage is just plain silly!

For this, I currently use DevonThink Pro. I have an Applescript linked to a hotkey trigger (ctrl-alt-command-M, heretofore reered to a smoosh-M) which brings up a list of meeting types I attend (manager meetings, team meetings, project-specific meetings, etc), then opens up a new document tagged with today's date in the corresponding DevonThink group, plus a "to-dos" pad for this particular type of meeting (which holds action items going out, plus responses or action items going in).

Once the meeting's window is up, I "full screen" it (F8; the screen turns to green text on black background with only the style bar visible at the top) if I'm too likely to get distracted in the meeting, or just configure the windows so that both the task list and the meeting window are usable at a click. From there, I take notes, sometimes in outline form and sometimes in just straight text.

When someone mentions "Bug 3275", and I think "Where did I hear that bug number before?", a click on "See Also" will generally lead me right there, and I can impress the entire room by recalling the details of the last time that bug was discussed. Okay, maybe "impress" is too strong of a word. But it does keep the meeting moving along; there is nothing worse than six managers sitting in a room trying to think of what they'd decided the last time about a particular issue. In fact, this is about 95% of the reason I take notes in the first place!

Occasionally, I will need to do some bad artwork copied from the whiteboard. Here's where the system gets taxed. Do I try to convey the artwork (often in the form of modified Venn diagrams, entity diagrams, and swooping arrows) textually, or graphically? If I choose graphically, I generally pop open FlySketch (from Gus of VoodooPad fame), draw away, then copy/paste the graphic into the DT window (which will then need to be full-screened again). Textually lets me stay in the confines of DT, which is better.

The main downside over pen/paper: I can't draw as an overlay (eg, write something down, then circle it and draw a swoopy double-arrow across the page to some other circled word). I generally live without this, though, instead expressing the connection in bolded or upsized text.

Ideally, I'd have a multi-column outliner like OmniOutliner which allows graphics to be pasted in (although maybe it already does this), and which integrates with the contextual-indexing system of DevonThink. Until that happens, though, the "outlining" capabilities of NSTextArea (which name I might have wrong; the widget both TextEdit and DevonThink use for typing text) are sufficient, although just barely.

My general rules of note-taking:

1. Every note is plain text. I don't futz with colors and fonts at all, although I do mess around with outline levels. However, TextMate doesn't work here because some of the text needs to be highlighted and such to draw out-of-band connections so that the next time I look at the notes I don't have to read every word to find the ultra-important "what did we decide" nugget.
2. Write in semi-complete sentences. I'm a rather fast typer, and am generally able to type (albeit a bit slower) while listening to something else (albeit without full attention). Obviously not everything can be captured in complete sentences, because five people can produce words at a rate far exceeding my typing capacity. So, I need to be selective about what I write down (next rule). Still, if I write it down, it needs to be decipherable when I look at it again next week or next month (remember: this is 95% of the reason I'm writing notes to begin with!)
3. Be selective in capturing points. We don't need a transcript. My wife has a jogging GPS which tracks her jogging routes on a map after she gets home. Looking at it, you can see that not every GPS reading is preserved; GPS readings get saved only when her velocity changes. Same with taking notes. I don't care about the specific words uttered in a meeting or even 75% of the ideas brought forth, until the one comes forth which shoots us off in a completely different direction (or stops us in our tracks). That's what needs to be captured.
4. All action items get placed on the meeting sheet using a "=>" prefix so they stand out, then copied to the meeting audience task list window. After the meeting, these action items will either result in "real" action items for me, or go to the task list of other meeting audiences for discussion in the next meeting of that sort. Kinda sorta a GTD context concept. The reason for them living in two separate locations is that the "task list" is volatile and has no history; once a task is completed it gets removed (or marked as completed and in the post-meeting follow-up I place a note on its completion in the other audience's task list).

Whew. Seems like a lot to deal with, but I've been humming along quite well for a little over a year on this system and haven't really hit any brick walls yet. It's saved my butt a few times when I've needed to pull information from a long-past meeting. I've never been organized enough with paper and pads (primarily due to my bad habit of just grabbing any available pad to write on when I need something to write on); trying to glean such information from months-old paper pads would have been completely futile.