As to the rest though, I have exactly the same complaints about touchpad - lack of speed, accuracy, etc... it just boggles my mind how people can put up with it (especially on smaller laptops/netbooks).
Largely I imagine therefore it's whatever you're used to. That being said, and for whatever this extremely biased and small sample is worth, there's nobody I know (friends, family, co-workers, fellow geeks) who can beat me on either speed or precision if they use a touchpad and I use trackpoint. I can pinpoint things down to a pixel (can never do it with touchpad, regardless of time), drag & drop with ease and I can move from one corner of the screen to the other in less than a second in one motion.
[couldn't care less about "professional" look - nobody I know would be impressed... if anything, most people will just look at me in bewilderment/pity when I try to use the touchpad :]
Trackballs, touchpads, mice, even a lot of esoteric solutions such as eye-trackers do. Even Valve made a controller with touchpads to work around this problem.
I find them too slow for long distances too, and they tend not to be accurate enough if you increase the speed.
I had a couple of friends at university looking forward to have some of those, but they admitted (on their own, while presented with the above argumentation) it was for the "premium/professional" look of those rather than usability.
So,in my highly subjective experience, this input method is highly unusable when used as a mouse. I wonder how you perceive these issues? Maybe I am just using them the wrong way?
Edit: One thing I wish more laptops had is a third button, though, if only for interacting with tabs/link in the browser, and copy/paste. You can also use a touch pad with your thumb quite accurately (tap to click), but it's a bit awkward.