>its kind of obvious that for the need to compromise the ui of mac in order for ipad/iphone apps to look "at home"

I think AS laptops are also getting touchscreens (now or on the first design refresh).

But I welcome bigger screen elements myself, it means better hit targets (Fitt's law), and less cluttered UIs -- easier on the eyes too.

As for the wasted space, it's not like they're removing menu items or icons or cutting out features to accomondate the larger buttons. Just larger looking bezels and edges.

If that's the reason why, then I guess I don't want a touch screen mac. Looking at my screen now, I would fat finger just about everything if it was a touch screen as sensitive as my iPhone (where I fat finger quite a few of things, and my fingers are really quite narrow). The mouse is a precision instrument. Your finger is not. I'd hate for the UI to suffer due to catering toward a less precise input I have no intention of ever using.

Well, a UI requiring less precision to accomondate fingers wouldn't suffer for mouse use.

If anything, it's the contrary: it would become easier to use with the higher precision mouse, because targers would be even larger.

The key insight here is that they wont make the mouse lose precision: instead, they make the targets the mouse has to hit bigger -- which, given that the mouse retains the same precision, makes it even easier to hit them!

It would suffer by loosing data density. I don't want to loose effective screen real estate where it is already limited on a laptop. I try to keep my browser windows as slim as possible for this reason.