Likewise I know developers that bring external keyboards like the Kinesis in their backpacks to wherever they want to hack.
Edit: that being said, you're right that it adds up. I believe the author of the article also uses a vertical mouse. That's a lot of gear to haul to Starbucks!
But in the end humans are social animals. Thus peer approval, even if we don't know them by name etc, carry mental weight.
I had my laptop pinched last week so I've been on a Mac desktop with a Mighty Mouse. The gesture control is so clumsy compared to what you can do with a trackpad.
I think much of the problem with Windows is in the Synaptics driver. On one Windows machine, I see 5-10% CPU usage whenever my finger's touching the trackpad. The trackpad on that machine works a lot better on Linux. On the other hand, some other trackpads work far better on Windows than on Linux.
One big difference between trackpad behavior on Windows and OS X is that on OS X there's always delay between when your hand touches the trackpad and when the mouse starts moving -- the first N ms are ignored. On Windows, it varies from machine to machine -- for example, on an ASUS machine I have, you need a certain threshold of movement and then the pointer catches up to what its location would be, but with others there's no delay.
Lately I've been using a chromebook with arch whenever I use a laptop ( luckily it's not too often ), and while they keyboard isn't completely awful, going from mechanicals at work and home to a chicklet keyboard is annoying at best. I've been looking for a decent portable mechanical keyboard to throw in my backpack, but so far a densely keyed (not sure if that's the right term?) tenkeyless is the best I've found, and I'm having a hard time imagining a keyboard with all the "extra" keys being almost pocket sized, unless you're bringing back JNCO ;).
Sure thing; I have photos and kits for sale at http://atreus.technomancy.us
It takes a long time to learn since it's a pretty big divergence from the conventional design. It only has 42 keys, but with the fn layer (activated with the thumb rather than an awkward pinky reach you normally see on laptops) you can still hit all the keys you need. The other upside is apart from being much smaller it also means your fingers never have very far to reach, so it's also more comfortable.
(BTW, the article did mention and link the Atreus, so you probably don't need to dance around it like that)
While maybe not going as far as becoming proficient in whatever setup could be considered the "lowest common denominator", I prefer to use a setup that is flexible across locations and environments. There's a lot of freedom in being able to move about between workstations and locations and still be fast and capable.