They never took it away, they tried to switch the touchpad to an integrated unit in the *40 gen (240, 440, 540) (like how Apple does it) and had to revert it because (1) they did such a godawful job of the sensitivity and (2) integrated touchpad buttons don't make sense in conjunction with the trackpoint.
Well, it was truly a piece of shitty crap. Absolutely not comparable to how Apple does it - and by several order of magnitude... it was a soo huge disaster that they made sure to design the next model so people would be able to retrofit its touchpad with buttons on their Tx40...