At one point I owned a tablet laptop and switching to pen input was extremely awkward.

Edit: imaging lifting your hand from the table and poking screen for several minutes. Screen wobbles each time. Your hand gets tired from being suspended, but putting it back is almost too much work. Apple might invent something, but there is only so much to be done with certain form factors.

All my laptop and desktop screens are touch screens, and the laptops have pens. It's not awkward or tiring if you have it set up well. Lifting my hand from the keyboard up to the desktop touch screen to tap something is often quicker than moving there with a mouse.

What kind of screens do you use for desktop?

Either all-in-ones by HP, or Dell external touch screen monitors. There are other options available, but I've ended up with multiple of each of these, as they're available and work well IME.

When was the last time you tried a tablet laptop? Microsoft now has a series of very good 2-1 under their Surface brand. I'm writing this on a Surface Book 2, the display can be detached from the keyboard by pressing one button, and that works really really well. The display is very stable in laptop mode, the pen is attached via magnet on the side so I can quickly grab it and just draw or write something. It also has the best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop (though that's of course completely subjective).

You may want to try one in a store, I personally changed my mind on the 2-in-1 form factor after using one for a few minutes.

The main issue is that Windows 10 is quite bad at dealing with the transition between laptop and tablet mode, similar to when you connect an external display the screen blinks a few times, everything resize hysterically, so you have to wait a few seconds for the UI to transition.

Edit: the touch display is just way too practical when you want to quickly scroll a page or touch a button located on the opposite side of the screen. IMHO it doesn't have to be something you use all the time to be worth it.

I lift a hand a few seconds in a minute, not for several minutes because mainly use trackpad and sometimes use touchscreen. It's still useful.

Totally agree, I had a Dell XPS 15 touchscreen laptop, and while I found Windows too unproductive to replace my MacBook Pro for development work, going back to the dumb non-touch screen made the Mac frustrating.

I would use the mouse/pad/keyboard 90% or maybe 95% of the time — but the inability to just tap the button or pinch-zoom or whatever the other 5% of the time... it's just stupid.

All 5-year-olds perceive screens that you can't directly interact with to be broken... and they're right.

I was forced to get a touchscreen by dell to get 4k. I never touch it, have an external keyboard and mouse. When I clean it, it produces a lot of erroneous input.

Perhaps you should turn off the touchscreen so you don’t accidentally trigger it.

Interesting, happens rarely so never thought of it:

    xinput list
    xinput disable 11

I have an XPS 13 with a 4K touch screen. I view it as an anti-feature that I occasionally brush with weird unwanted effects.