I think you must have palmed your touchpad while typing out that list and somehow messed up the order. This is what you actually meant: 3 physical button trackpoint with textured nub gifted upon us by the Thinkpad Gods of old >>>> apple stuff > other stuff. There shall be no further debate!
ThinkNubs are good. Apple Touchpads occasionally look down from their seat at Mount Olympus to be entertained by watching the mortals, such as the ThinkNub, go through their silly struggles of life.
PC touchpads, on the other hand, can only be explained by their creators being evil incarnate. Such malice cannot sprout from nothing.
Thinkpad Touchpads are particularly evil, as the BIOS touchpad disable on some Thinkpads with ThinkNubs disable the mouse buttons belonging to the ThinkNub.
As Jesus once said: "Transplant me an Apple Touchpad, completed by the pointer stack from macOS, onto a PC with Linux, and thou shall be permitted into Heaven."
Seriously, though, the Nub is like a joystick, where touchpads, touchscreens and mice are basically absolute positioning devices when implemented correctly (such as on a Mac)—that is, move distance N on the touchpad/touchscreen/mouse, and the cursor will move exactly that distance, as if you had physically grabbed the cursor and moved it. With the nub, the distance becomes a function of time+accel.
> With the nub, the distance becomes a function of time+accel.
On the Pinnacle of Godly Perfection pointing device that is the Thinkpad Trackpoint, which was used to create life the universe and everything along with a lot of perl, it is a function of time+accel+pressure!
i.e. the pointer moves faster as you push harder in any direction, like any good analog joystick. Except for the Trackpoint you need only to twitch your index finger the tiniest bits to traverse the whole screen.
Might feel weird at first but you get used to it very quickly. Dragging my finger all over the laptop surface is tiring. Same with Mr Mouse. Yes I keep the sensitivity very high.
I included pressure in accel. Yeah, like a joystick, you can just use time held to move across the entire screen, but just like a joystick, it makes using the mouse akin to driving a small RC car around on your screen, trying to park it on the button you want to press. And just like with an RC car, you can miss your target.
With tracking pointer devices (touchpad, touchscreen, wacom), with a proper stack (i.e. only touchpad on macs), the mouse becomes your finger, reapplying existing finger dexterity entirely andgiving an extremely intuitive input method. Except for bad touchpad stacks, you don't miss or even need to look.
Yes, the touchpad requires full index finger flex/extension to get from one end to the other, but so does moving from "c" to "t" on a QWERTY layout, so I can't see that as a valid complaint. Unless the touchpad has a bad surface texture (i.e. not Apple-style glass), the same goes for fatigue—you're moving your fingers way more when typing.
The only downside I can think of for touchpads is that, like mice but unlike ThinkNubs, one must move the hand away from the keyboard to use it in most setups. ThinkNubs are neatly placed near the homerow, although they eat part of the keys as a result.
(Mice are a bit in between, as they use shoulder/elbow/wrist to aim, which is far less precise than fingers. They still reuse physical dexterity, but are less precise than finger based tracking inputs. Trackballs and rollers are just weird, though.)
Ah how I wish I still had a laptop with the nub (even if it had a touch pad too). I've never really understood why that didn't become standard since I think Toshiba and maybe even Dell had a variant of it.
The multi-gesture touch pads are nice, but for precision and minimal interference without a standard desk mouse the nub is supreme.