I don't necessarily care if it's a point or pad. I need it to get the jobs done that I mentioned above.

Can you with your laptop, and if so, which is it?

I had a Dell Precision M4300 for quite some time. Good laptop, decent trackpoint - but it was not good enough for design work:

My main problem was offsetting the cursor a tiny number of pixels, which needed some starting force on the trackpoint, which lead to more pixels than I needed. Some trackpoint laptop might have figured this out by now. But if not, I'm not interested.

There are dozens of us! I've tried to get comfortable with touchpads, but I always find them frustrating (yes, even MBP touchpads). For instance, selecting text with them is a disaster. Trackpoint or external mouse for me.