[jasomill]

While your drawing comment leads me to suspect you probably already have one, it's worth pointing out that Wacom pen tablets are an excellent alternative to mice, especially for people who have difficulty using the latter (arthritis in my case), and in particular when using "mouse-heavy" IDEs, as they're particularly good for text selection. I haven't personally used a mouse on a regular basis in well over a decade.

More recently, I've also found the combination of large Intuos tablet "stage right" and an Apple Magic Trackpad "stage left" for gestures and other things where precision is unnecessary to be a nice way to spread the load across both hands, though I'm not sure how well it'd work, if at all, under Windows or Linux (natively — it works great with VMware Fusion). And while it'd be a nonstarter for people who do lots of numeric input, I've also found smaller keyboards without numeric keypads can make a significant difference in ergonomics, though this is probably somewhat specific to elbow problems like my own.

[e12e]

Actually no -- I've only recently taken up graphical input (for post-processing/touching up photos) -- and I've yet to invest in any new hardware for that. Your comment on using one for "normal" input is very welcome -- I would've thought they'd be pretty horrible for exactly the things you say they're good at. Moves a wacom tablet higher on my list of hardware to get.

Still, if I can afford it when it gets out, I'm considering getting a modbook:

http://www.modbook.com/modbookpro

I suspect we'll see more hardware along these lines as Microsoft push out w8 and touch input becomes more viable for the mainstream (or perhaps more marketed -- hence increasing the sales/production volume and dropping the price of parts).