A lot of Apple's multitouch technology originated from their acquisition of FingerWorks. That company was founded in 1998 and bought in 2005. Apple started shipping multitouch smartphones in 2007 and multitouch trackpads in 2008. Some of the early patents should be close to expiration, but it may still be years before anyone else can duplicate the '08 MacBook Pro touchpad, and Apple has made two major revisions to their touchpads since then.
What kinds of things are they doing that seem to be so important? The sensor side seems to be pretty well solved by Synaptics and co. (doesn't Apple use Alps trackpads?).
RANT: The others just don't care? Lenovo, HP and Dell are catering the corporate market and build most of their models with the corporate bean counter in mind. You don't see stunning displays or fabulous track pads because those are hard to measure in numbers. If two laptops have the same measurable features, then the one with cheaper price tag is likely to win.
Same goes for the LCD, Lenovo was infamous for putting the shittiest panel for so long because it doesn't really matter for business use cases. They offer more quality panels nowadays, but everytime I open my old thinkpads my have need 5 seconds to readjust to such sad levels of contrast and luminosity.
These days I'd be looking into DIY mods, so many people are into hacking I'm sure it's possible to swap these.
Yeah they're probably "good enough" for most and the market hasn't demanded it (especially since only a minority do design). It's probably similar to how so many people are still not into multitasking and are happy enough to focus on one tab at a time, etc.
Consider another angle to this: look at all the cheap poor-quality keyboards that get bundled with business desktop computers these days. Comparatively speaking, nobody cares.
Outside of technology, my main hobby is cycling. The number of times where I've seen "experienced" cyclists or would-be experienced riders not care about having the right specific gear for the task (n.b., not necessarily expensive), or not using it in the most ideal way is remarkable.