> The usability on a laptop goes out the window

On a non-Apple trackpad, I'm sure. Apple / macOS has had "3 finger drag" for a good few years now.

With it, there's no clicking involved: you put 3 fingers on your trackpad and move them and it's a drag operation. There's even a timeout / grace period before the drag is actually "committed".

You can also flick any one of your 3 fingers and it will drag + move your cursor with inertia.

And before they introduced 3 finger drag, there was always a timeout when doing tap + drag to account for running into the physical edge of your trackpad.

Having said all that, yeah I agree this isn't a great interaction on non-mobile devices.