My XPS has the advantage of two physical buttons for left and right click. They require just the right amount of force to press (like a slightly softer mouse button with deeper travel). It makes dragging things around (which I do a lot because I don't use a tiling window manager) very easy. Which doesn't feel like something I should have to comment on, but doing this on a MacBook is pure suffering. Trying to hold down the giant button (which takes quite a bit of force) while trying to drag your finger... ugh. It's miserable. Because of the physical buttons I can actually play some games on my XPS without needing an external mouse (or putting up with misclicks)
In terms of hardware, what people are looking for is mostly surface feel, size, features. It's the former where cheap laptops fall down. Most of the ones I've used really suck, actually. Some of them are bad enough that the manufacturers actually texture the surface to try to slow your finger down, I guess because the accuracy of the touchpad isn't very good. High end touchpads like the one on the XPS or MacBooks have flawless feel: extremely low friction surfaces.
It's not commonly noticed, but software contributes at least as much to how a trackpad feels as hardware. Given the limitations of its hardware, I have no quarrel with Apple's software quality. (Though the defaults are weird, like not being able to tap-to-click. They really want you to have to use that damn button.)
Windows has historically sucked at this. I've seen about half a dozen trackpads that seemed absolutely terrible, and no Windows settings could make them better. After moving them over to Linux (on the synaptics driver) they suddenly became quite okay to use, even if the hardware was crappy. I'm afraid this era might be ending, sadly. I've had nothing but bad experiences with libinput. It lacks the kind of configurability you need to improve on the performance of a bad touchpad. (It's even quite bad under Wayland for the XPS touchpad - you can't set the combination of low speed, high acceleration that feels natural to me for this touchpad.)
Not wishing to detract from your personal experience but "quite a bit of force" is at odds to mine - on this M1 MBP, it takes less force to activate the trackpad click than it does to activate a keypress. And once you've clicked, you can use a second figure to drag; no need to try and drag with the force finger (I use my thumb to click for power*, then index to drag for accuracy.)
One thing I would definitely expect a recent migrant to apple trackpads to experience as negative would be "force click". The apple trackpads sense force in some analogue way and if you push hard enough you can activate another action called force click. It's ridiculously easy to activate on accident when holding click while dragging -- but this "feature" can be turned off (and probably should be for most people I'd wager).
I've never tried using the middle finger for dragging -- seems awkward but i'll give it a try ... won't that activate the two finger drag operation?
No, because you've clicked which makes it a different operation than just two fingers scrolling or zooming.
My understanding is that Apple has made the clicks much lighter in their later models - along with doing the exact same thing with the keyboard keys, which for me goes much to far in the other direction.
- keyboards were reverted similar to how they were around 2015. - all the new trackpads are don’t require a physical actuation to activate. You can apply the same amount of minimal pressure anywhere on the trackpad and it “presses back” at you to simulate a physical click. It’s quite convincing.
One can leverage the haptic feedback to make the TouchBar a bit more lively[0]. The illusion breaks a bit since the haptic device is farther away from the touch surface but it's still quite a transformative experience for the TB.
But the touchpad can be configured for the bottom side of the touchpad to function as buttons: if you touch it directly, it won't register as mouse movement. If you press on the left, it's a left button, right is a right button. So while not actual physical buttons, it's pretty damn close. I don't actually use this so not sure houw this would work out in practice for your needs.
Regarding the dragging situation, there's another setting that's now been buried in "Accessibility" for some reason, but that was present in the touchpad settings before: "drag hold".
This allows you to lift the finger from the touchpad for a brief period while dragging without stopping the dragging. This, to me, is the pinnacle of touchpad experience. You can start dragging wherever you want on the pad and go as far as you like, you never run out of space.
There's also a similar option that some people like: three-finger drag. It works like scrolling, except that if you use three fingers it starts dragging.
In fact, I think I like the trackpad on my cheap Logitech K400 just as much as the Macbook, I'd be hard pressed to point to a significant problem with either.
Two-finger scrolling on the K400+ is painful. (Actually physically painful; I have RSI in my right arm and poorly-tracking touchpads can be a trigger.) It requires fairly heavy pressure on the touchpad to trigger gestures consistently (though they can be triggered inconsistently with light pressure which is also frustrating). And especially on macOS, it's difficult to actually scroll a consistent distance with a two-finger gesture with the K400+.
I'm fairly certain this has to do with the K400+'s touchpad not being recognized as a touchpad by the OS. The device is instead emitting mouse wheel events in firmware when a two-finger scroll gesture is detected. macOS will then, of course, apply mouse wheel acceleration, which makes sense for some mice but absolutely does not make sense for a touchpad.