I think how it survives depends on the angle from which it crashes to the ground, as well as the touch point. From the picture, it looks that the touch point is the lower left corner of the keyboard side. From that point to the touchpad, is the aluminum shell, which is relatively more flexible than the touchpad glass and absorbed quite some crash impact to that part...Then from that point on, the touchpad had to broke itself to absorbed the impact propagated from the left side of the touchpad to its right side. And we can see from the picture that there was some point at which the crash force was so great that the touchpad from that point on broke into pieces at finer granularity; and that point is also near the line where the aluminum shell displays a more obvious dent.
I just feel the deformation as the result of this crash is quite predictable, given the same initial parameters...Then why bother went up that high and threw out the laptop, at the risk of hitting some farmer? And if the purpose is to infer some universal rules by induction, I guess many many more laptops (all with the same initial form) need to be thrown out at that height...