I can see value in finding a way to expose individual touch points from their new touchpad to JavaScript. We looked at doing something similar in IE, actually, but didn't get around to it in time.

If they want to do that, then they're going to have lots of compatibility problems doing it with Touch Events. Too much code out there expects the presence of Touch Events to mean a touch-only device. So if you enable TE on a laptop, suddenly sites stop working for mouse/track. :-( Pointer Events don't have this problem.

Interesting thought, I'm not sure if PointerEvents would be handled correctly with a trackpad that would have traditionally used as Mouse input either. Seems like the developer would have to know how the trackpad is being used more than anything else since mouse/touch are very different behaviors.

yep, we imagined this would be surfaced as a new event.pointerType value, allowing code to specifically target the device if desired.

More to the point, developers think that pointer events obviate the need for separate codepaths that accomplish the same thing.

So then we can be pretty sure Apple won't be releasing a laptop/desktop computer with a touch screen?

Seems to me that standard touch events would work fine if I was touching the screen on my Mac. How do pointer events help with that?

Because both the touch events standard assumes that you don't have a mouse, and the mouse events standard assumes that you don't have a touch input. They aren't designed to both be running at the same time.