This is interesting, because I'm pretty sure Microsoft is going to go full steam ahead with pointer events. Indeed, they're the only major vendor of a device that supports both mouse and touch (finger AND stylus) events – it's going to be super important to handle those events well.

I'm not totally convinced by the Blink argument – the fact that "touch events are here to stay" is irrelevant, given the unifying nature of pointer events; "fast by default" is a noble goal, but must be a trade-off with functionality; and the whole event-handling-scrolling mess doesn't seem like enough of a deal breaker to preclude tweaks to the spec to fix it.

That said, I'm sure they've had extensive discussions about it and made this decision for a good reason - I hope they now push ahead hard with an alternative solution to these problems.