I have a Surface Pro for work and have no qualms saying the touchpad on my 2015 MBP is vastly superior. They're not even in the same league. To be honest, the touchpad on my 2011 MBP, whilst lacking the more modern refinements, such as force touch, still offers a better, more usable, experience than the touchpad on the Surface Pro.

The Surface Pro is also beset with a host of other glitches that simply should not be present on a laptop costing north of £2k so I would strongly recommend you look to spend your money elsewhere. (Sadly, I'm not too sure where - I find the PC laptop market somewhat hard to navigate, but I'm going to have to learn when it comes time to replace my 2015 MBP, unless Apple make some major improvements in the next release or two.)

Multi button vertical mice are vastly superior to touch pads and I can use every single one of them with Windows.

Macs have shitty support for these mice.

I’m so glad that I’m not locked into any hardware, except of course when I want to compile an app for iOS.

Sure, and I have a mouse both in my office, and at home, but don't tend to carry it when I'm travelling because space really is at a premium in my bag. The MBP is the only laptop I've ever used that has a trackpad that is tolerable as a replacement for a mouse. Still not as good as a mouse, but better (often way better) than the rest.

My issue with the Surface Pro specifically is that it's competing in the, well, I won't say high end (because that implies something about hardware specs that may not be true), but certainly the expensive [1] laptop market, yet is plagued with annoyances, some of which are quite severe: bad touchpad, sketchy WiFi, indifferent (at best) battery life, and rapid battery drainage during sleep, to name but a few.

[1] I won't say premium either because, given the issues, it's premium only in the sense that you pay one.

I’m curious even after a decade no vendor can produce a comparable touchpad is there any technology that only apple have the patent

A lot of Apple's multitouch technology originated from their acquisition of FingerWorks. That company was founded in 1998 and bought in 2005. Apple started shipping multitouch smartphones in 2007 and multitouch trackpads in 2008. Some of the early patents should be close to expiration, but it may still be years before anyone else can duplicate the '08 MacBook Pro touchpad, and Apple has made two major revisions to their touchpads since then.

What kinds of things are they doing that seem to be so important? The sensor side seems to be pretty well solved by Synaptics and co. (doesn't Apple use Alps trackpads?).

RANT: The others just don't care? Lenovo, HP and Dell are catering the corporate market and build most of their models with the corporate bean counter in mind. You don't see stunning displays or fabulous track pads because those are hard to measure in numbers. If two laptops have the same measurable features, then the one with cheaper price tag is likely to win.

Same goes for the LCD, Lenovo was infamous for putting the shittiest panel for so long because it doesn't really matter for business use cases. They offer more quality panels nowadays, but everytime I open my old thinkpads my have need 5 seconds to readjust to such sad levels of contrast and luminosity.

These days I'd be looking into DIY mods, so many people are into hacking I'm sure it's possible to swap these.

Yeah they're probably "good enough" for most and the market hasn't demanded it (especially since only a minority do design). It's probably similar to how so many people are still not into multitasking and are happy enough to focus on one tab at a time, etc.

Consider another angle to this: look at all the cheap poor-quality keyboards that get bundled with business desktop computers these days. Comparatively speaking, nobody cares.

Outside of technology, my main hobby is cycling. The number of times where I've seen "experienced" cyclists or would-be experienced riders not care about having the right specific gear for the task (n.b., not necessarily expensive), or not using it in the most ideal way is remarkable.

My 2017 Thinkpad x1c touchpad is as good as any Macbook. And the keyboard is probably the best on any laptop I've ever used.