If the Absorber/towel/whatever is soft enough, it won't mar the finish in and of itself. The problem is often from contamination let on the vehicle that gets ground into the paint during the drying. With the absorber there's no nap for this stuff to get caught up in.
IMO if you get the vehicle *perfectly* clean then neither approach will mar the finish, but that can be a big "if" for most people. The WW MF doesn't have much nap for dirt to get caught up in either- it's not as flat as an Absorber but it's not plush like a fluffy towel either.
Still, I've retired my Absorber-type products in favor of WWs. If nothing else, I find that the WWs get that last tiny bit of moisture that the Absorber-type products tend to leave behind.
What you could do is use the Absorber to blot the majority of the water up (just lay it on the surface for a few seconds and then peel it off without moving it side-side) and then use a WW to get the last bit of water up.
FWIW some WWs aren't all *that* soft, especially after they've been used for a while and some people have reported micromarring from them. I have several different kinds (not the PakShak ones though) and the gray ones from MicroFiberTech are much softer than the others even after quite a lot of use. They're all I use on my "good" cars, but I do use something else to blot up some of the water, as previously described, first.
And yeah, blowing off the excess water and/or using the sheeting-rinse technique can be a good first step. Just don't stir up any dust while blowing it off.
