Who has a useful trackpad anyways? An actually great one, besides Apple?

I have no idea why this is the case? Patents or too expensive to justify?

Genuinely curious

Surface's trackpad is as good as Mac's even though all other parts of experience is trash.

However, now Mac has this force touchpad which you don't really press, so it recognises all of the presses with no respect to where you do it. Nobody has anything like this and I must tell you that one gets used to it reaaaaaaly quick.

Most Windows PCs which ship with precision drivers and an oversized glass trackpad feel 90% as good as the MacBooks. The Surface line and the new Razer Blade 15 are two examples.

The precision drivers are key. Many manufacturers still haven't adopted them, and they are the main reason why Windows trackpads still get a bad rep.

I like my XPS 13 trackpad :) The mac ones seems too big, suspect it would be in the way and hamper the keyboard. (I haven't used a the newer Mac models enough to be certain). Dells works great on Linux (Arch + KDE)

It is too big. It's nice but too big. It is, however, an excellent trackpad. Reviews constantly name it #1.

De-coupling of hardware and software mainly. All kinds of 3rd parties writing drivers for the trackpad for an OS they don't have control over.

I've heard the Microsoft Surface is very good.

It is lovely, as is the Surface Book 2, the pen inking is sublime ;)

I have no issues with it. Macs may have a better trackpad, but there's absoultely nothing wrong with it. I'm using Arch w/i3 and use whatever stock settings there are.

I fix things for a living and spending time “hacking” my OS to make the trackpad tolerable would steal time from that.

I kind of agree with you though, I wish some people would do it. The MacBook trackpad being damn near magic compared to anything else that isn’t a surface is the main thing keeping me from Linux. That being said, I also work with efficiency, and the thought of millions of users “hacking” at their OS in exactly the same way, over and over and over, is just so much wasted potential.

I guess it’s hard to write decent trackpad software for hardware you aren’t building yourself though, but it makes you wonder why companies like dell don’t bother making their hardware worth purchasing by having decent software support for it.

You just told a fellow human being you wished there were fewer people like him/her. Rephrase, maybe?

I'm not sure configuring a Linux distro to work better really counts as 'hacking' either though.

Apple is a terribly profitable company, it does not pay karma to question them.