Delighted to see this. The X61 is one of my favorite laptops and I felt silly buying a second one (8 years ago..!) when it was already considered out of date.
I recently had the same thought I did then: what if I got another X61?!
It's really disappointing that Lenovo's Thinkpad division went with a Macbook-ification of the product line, though I understand why they did.
One thing I discovered: Thinkpad sells external USB & bluetooth keyboards that have the pointing stick. They're based on the newer Thinkpad keyboard design but it was a nice enough compromise for me that I went for it.