Big assumption that you're using a mouse (especially considering the ubiquitousness of laptops). Laptops provide a ready-made surface for fully portable use and I've found getting using a touchpad for professional and personal use[0] to be more than sufficient and that the availability of easy to use gestures is very nice.
If you haven't tried gestures on OS X with Apple's touch hardware, I'd highly recommend attempting to use them regularly. I got a fancy Razer Blade 2016 and using the touchpad is significantly worse than an Apple laptop, and OS X has much better native touch support (3rd party software might make Windows better).
I'd say touch interfaces are great compliments to keyboards for text editing workflows (more or less all I do professionally), you don't even need to move your hands off the keyboard to get a mouse (hooray thumbs!).
I would liken getting used to laptop keyboard/touchpad as getting used to a minimalist *nix install. It's difficult at first, but once you get used to it you have a great skillset that lets you do anything you want on almost any computer. Not that you should never nice high-level and user friendly programs, but being able to drop down a level of abstraction and still get the job done is great for understanding how systems work.
[0]: most of my video games suck without a mouse, but that's the only wall my personal use runs into
I think hands are great when there is a massive multitude of possible next actions, like the knitting example, or artistic applications. Otherwise, if we can logically eliminate options of what the user could be doing (this object can only go in so many slots, etc), it's easy to just assist the user with that (think snap-to-grid) and then a precision input device is less necessary.