I’ve had a few conversations with Apple owners as to whether multi-touch on a trackpad is as good as or better than multi-touch on the screen. They argue, most commonly, that it’s better to touch the touchpad than to put fingersmudges on the screen.
I think the issue is about devices being used where the value fits best.
On a notebook, a mouse as a pointing device is not that common anymore. People are moving to trackpads. And for those that don’t, notice how little they use the trackpad. It’s still there and useful to them, just not something they use all the time. It’s not something that they want to get rid of. They might need it.
Point is, people balance their use between a mouse and a trackpad depending on the value they get from them.
Same will go for multi-touch on the screen. Or “vision”-based gesturing when it comes mainstream, and so on. You don’t have to use anything all the time. Use it when you need it.
Now, costs being what they are, there is the issue of picking the minimal set of features that provide the maximum value. So all devices are not going to likely have all capabilities. That’s OK.
Cost is one reason I think we’re seeing tackpads with multi-touch over displays with multi-touch. The devices are already in most notebooks and it’s an incremental change to add them.
But all is not ideal. Note in this Imagine Resource posting that Adobe is providing an optional plugin for Photoshop to disable trackpad multi-touch gesturing on the trackpad. Why? Because it’s too easy to accidentally invoke a gesture and cause the canvas to rotate or similar.
That’s a lot less likely to happen with screen-based multi-touch on a notebook assuming a similar usage model to how people are using their Macs notebooks today with Photoshop.
Anyway, false triggers on trackpads I’ve noticed are becoming more and more common, partly because more and more features are being added to them, partly because of how they are placed on the keyboard. As people start seeing how multi-touch works, I bet we’ll see more people accepting display-based multi-touch and reaching for it over a trackpad.