Apple Slapped with Multitouch Patent Lawsuit

I still find it amazing that this patent holds water. It's so vague, they can apply their flow charts and finger operations to any and all multi-finger interaction with a surface. The finger detection method I know I've seen in other uses, and quite frankly if given a pressure-sensitive touchscreen it would've been the first thing I did with it.

If it's something stupendously obvious and vague, isn't it inherently unpatentable? If it weren't, we'd have a rush to patent "using a round object with an axle to move other objects more efficiently" and "causing an object to traverse a distance through the air by imparting kinetic energy".

Yeah, that's pretty much what we thought at Synaptics. It seems not to have turned out that way :-).

(I was working at Synaptics when what-was-then-Elantech first sued Synaptics. I never had much to do with the lawsuit. I left Synaptics quite a while before the suit was settled.)

This was reported before, albeit from a different site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1229821

Does this in any way explain the omission of multi-touch from the Apple v. HTC lawsuit?