If you’ve been using laptops since the early 1990s or so, you remember when they didn’t have pointing devices–because many folks didn’t need ’em. Odd clip-on trackballs followed, and then notebook manufacturers started building trackballs into their machines. There were some other oddball dead ends–anyone but me remember the J-Mouse or the HP OmniBook with a pop-out micromouse?–but manufacturers eventually settled on the touchpad (nearly pervasive today and highly evolved, as in the Apple MacBook Pro above) and the ThinkPad-style Trackpoint (less common, but still around). I’m fine with either option, but an awful lot of people shun both in favor of traveling with an undersized mouse that’s far closer to the one that Douglas Engelbart designed decades ago.