A touchpad is not a mouse, or at least not a good one

One of the things about having a pretty nice work laptop with a screen that's large enough to have more than one real window at once is that I actually use it, and I use it with multiple windows, and that means that I need to use the mouse. I like computer mice in general so I don't object to this, but like most modern laptops my Dell XPS 13 doesn't have a mouse, it has a trackpad (or touchpad, take your pick). You can use a modern touchpad as a mouse, but over my time in using the XPS 13 I've come to understand (rather viscerally) that a touchpad is not a mouse and trying to act as if it was is not a good idea. There are some things that a touchpad makes easy and natural that aren't very natural on a mouse, and a fair number of things that are natural on a mouse but don't work very well on a touchpad (at least for me; they might for people who are more experienced with touchpads). Chris Siebenmann makes some good points regarding touchpads here. Despite the fact that touchpads on Windows and Linux have gotten better over the years, they're still not nearly as good as Apple's, and will never beat a mouse. I feel like mouse input on laptops is ripe for serious innovation.