Any suggestions for work arounds here so I can do away with tablets altogether? If not, is there an uber cheap alternative I can use for my daughter's?
Well, there are these gadgets called "books" you may want to look into.
We've got smart phones (me, DH) and laptops (ditto) and DS (7) does not and is banned from using ours, full stop. He did just get (Christmas present) his first Kindle, an old-style one (procured via ebay). I'm not so sure I've actually achieved this (that the old Kindles are as limited in their functionality/connectivity as I thought), but we wanted to restrict his usage to reading, i.e., he sees on the screen what he'd see on a printed paper page and nothing more.
We do have a TV (and cable) and a household computer that is largely used by DS (since DH and I rely mostly on our laptops), so we're hardly Luddites, even when it comes to the kid. But steering clear of hand-held devices available to the kid (until we got the Kindle) has been *such* a wonderful thing for our household.
(We do limit adult usage of the electronics, too, i.e. DH and I are not "allowed" to whip out our phones when we are out-and-about as a family and to spend time lost in them rather than interacting with each other. Not that we are perfect about this and we certainly make and receive some calls/texts/emails or have been known to look something up. But we do try to be reasonably balanced and to behave ourselves approximately as we insist that DS behave. Obviously he's not the one e.g. figuring out how to get to our destination, so it's not a 1:1 comparison, but all the same.)