[squeed]

Indeed. They purchased FingerWorks[1], a maker of obscure touchpad-based keyboards, in order to get their touchpad experts.

Most other companies would just integrate Synaptic's reference design and call it a day.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

[wyclif]

Yes, these comments are exactly right. The other companies resigned to it being Good Enough for them, and don't care about making the trackpad excellent.