My wife has a Surface laptop and there are a lot of use cases where it's very natural to use touch. Scrolling when reading long documents is one. Looking at maps (e.g Google Maps) is another. Basically anything that has a lot of scrolling, panning, and zooming.

Drawing annotations is another. For example Slack screen share, whiteboard apps, and so on.

Of course there is the touchpad, but in these cases - especially when we are looking at something together - the touch screen makes more sense as an interface.

Gestures on the screen also tend to be 1:1 so there's more precision for these types of gestures.