When I've used my mom's Transformer Prime, I've found the touchscreen/keyboard combo much more convenient than my own traditional laptop's screen/trackpad combo.

A USB/Bluetooth mouse can be helpful, but there are many situations where that is inconvenient.

That said, if you are a wiz with keyboard shortcuts it won't make much of a difference. But most people aren't.

Unless the students have a mouse plugged in to their chromebooks, it's more of a comparison between a touchscreen and a touchpad. If the comparison is between two methods where you're dragging a finger around, I think that a touchscreen makes sense to have. You lose the precision of the cursor (and the convenience of the buttons), but you have a more interactive experience, which I imagine is especially convenient for younger students.

I agree, I've never seen the need for a standard touch-screen laptop, it seems like the touch-screen is in an inconvenient position since the keyboard sticks out of the computer. That said, I've been eyeing touch-screen laptops that can fold into a tablet form-factor for taking notes in class. It's one of the areas where I find I simply can't type in most notes I take. But, paper's still cheaper and works pretty well.

For browsing instead of touching the screen at arms' length I guess the mouse is the most practical thing to use to scroll down in a page - especially those mice with touch sensors.

As for laptops that can transform into tablets, I guess this makes more sense to have touch-screen anyway.

By the way are you saying that you can not type in class using a keyboard? Is there a reason for that?

Honestly I've used touch-screen laptops before and using the mouse is just more convenient because you have your hands down there to type 90% of the time anyway. You can get 'used' to using the touch-screen for certain things but for regular laptop usage I've never seen a reason to.

I can type in class if I wanted too (Though, typing it a bit loud, it'd be kinda annoying for my other class-mates). The issue is actually entering in my notes. For example, this summer I took Linear Algebra, and most of the class involves lots and lots of matrices. It's easy to write them on paper, but setting up the formatting correctly to have something readable on the computer is easier said then done. There were also a few classes where we had examples involving drawing two ovals next to each-other with dots inside and then drawing lines between the dots. I'd simply be fussing with my computer to much to actually pay attention and get all the information down when trying to draw out stuff like that. Using a simple notepad is just hands-down better. A tablet interface with a pen would be perfect though, because I could write all my notes down just like a note-pad into the computer, and then go back and reorganize them fairly easily.

I'd rather just buy a laptop that can fold into a tablet because I have no real need or want to have two separate devices considering I probably won't use tablet mode that much.

Web browsing in bed or by the beach...touch is great. But on a PC rather than a tablet? The jury is still out.