When was the last time you tried the trackpads on different brand notebooks?
They've gotten better.
For me the Dell XPS 13 9350's trackpad was good enough that getting all the goodies (USB A and USB C, a repair guide, changeable standard M.2 SSD, SD slot, non crappy keyboard, a lot cheaper) compared to the MacBook Pro made me switch to the Dell notebook.
It doesn't matter how good the other trackpads are if they don't have the software driving it. Even with Microsoft standardising the trackpad interface for drivers in Windows 10, that doesn't matter when plenty of non-Metro applications don't support multi-touch gestures or, if they do, inconsistently.
The MacBook story isn't components. When people compare a MacBook to a PC laptop, that's about where the comparison ends. Nobody wants to admit that the marriage of hardware and software does make a difference; this denial always comes from people who don't know what that difference is or never bothered to appreciate it and thus can't understand why others do.
I went from a MBP to a Dell Inspiron 7370 I installed Ubuntu on. I've found the trackpad to be just fine. I'm not doing any advanced multi finger gestures, but regular scrolling and two finger movements are good. Plus, I haven't ran into any palm rejection issues.
I'm a mouse user (who actually really liked both the much maligned mighty mouse and magic mouse), but when it came to track pads, I hated that Apple didn't have physical buttons for the trackpad.
My hand eye coordination on trackpads has never been great (and I'm not getting any younger), and I've always had issues with taps as clicks.
I've since switched back to Windows, and it drives me nuts that all the PC laptops that follow Apple's design lead that have dropped the physical trackpad buttons. Thankfully most of the business and "pro" laptops still have them.
The haptic trackpads on the newer macbooks are perfect for this. You can click anywhere on the pad and the amount of pressure required is exactly the same. It's not tap to click, because you need to actually press down for a click to register.
>I want to be able to have a finger on a physical button that doesn't detect any touch movements when dragging something.
But dragging works exactly the same as it does when you have a physical button. You press down with one finger and make the dragging motion with another. You can click and drag with a single finger if you want to (as I've just discovered - never occurred to me to do it that way), but you don't have to.
I have always found strange things to happen when my held down finger (on the "virtual button") moves too much or changes pressure - on both Windows and Mac. That's just one more thing to think about in the back of my head.
I especially hate the click and drag with a single finger, especially if I have multiple external monitors connected.
Personally, I prefer that a physical button only has two states (on/off), and that there be a physical division between the left and right buttons (so I don't have to look down and see whether my thumb is "over enough" - on a buttonless pad, it seems to never be over enough to the right when I want a context menu).
In the end, I just want the track pad to track, and buttons to be buttons. I don't want a unified trackpad with buttons and a software-based solution to guess what I'm trying to do. This is just me and my use case, obviously ymmv.
> But dragging works exactly the same as it does when you have a physical button.
No it doesn't, if I press down with the side of my thumb and then move around my index finger the thumb will rotate. On a physical button that doesn't matter but on a virtual button the thumbs movement will also move around the pointer. Using the thumb for buttons and index and long for trackpad is much faster and more accurate than using virtual buttons in my experience, not as good as a mouse but close.
I've been sitting here for a good minute trying to make my thumb rotate the way you've described on my Magic Trackpad (no hardware buttons) and it simply isn't doing that.
> Using the thumb for buttons and long for trackpad
I disagree. When I want to drag and precisely position something, I use three finger dragging. They've hidden it recent versions of macOS under Accessibility, but I find it much simpler and more precise than having to do finger gymnastics.
I don't use my thumb. It wouldn't really make sense to click and drag that way on an Apple trackpad since you don't have to reach down to the bottom. It's very easy to do using your index finger and middle finger.
You have to turn off "Tap to click" in the touchpad preferences. I can't remember if it is on by default or not, but it's the one thing I can't deal with. Any sort of accidental brush acts like a click and that's annoying, which sounds like what you are complaining about.
It's not on by default, which is what puzzles me about slantyyz's comments. I can't imagine anyone finding clicking and dragging more difficult on a macbook than on another laptop.
I find clicking and dragging more difficult on laptops without physical buttons (Macbook and Windows) than laptops with physical trackpad buttons. YMMV