Re: Similarly, if you have a touchscreen
"It's innate. Monkey see, monkey do."
Indeed, but if the monkey had seen the older monkey using a touchpad or mouse, younger monkey would be imitating that instead.
"Given that we are basically all now accustomed to finger-pokey phones and tablets (and, yes, cash machines and so on), then if it doesn't cost much more to put it on a laptop as well, why not?"
And there is the issue. For the record, I would not accept a touchscreen on a PC even if there was zero cost difference. It adds weight, screen reflection, and power consumption, and if I am not going to use it (and I'm not), why should I accept the burden?
The real cost, though, is not in the hardware. The cost is in the UI compromises that have to be made to accommodate touch. Windows went from having a very good GUI to that horrible "I don't know if I am a phone or a PC" mess that came with Windows 8, and it hasn't gotten much better in Windows 10.
Touch capability means the UI that is carefully crafted to work with a discrete pointing device is upended, and suddenly everything shifts to the touch paradigm, with its lack of hover effects, huge controls, and disappearing UI elements. What used to take a few clicks now takes many, and the useful toolbars that used to have single-step functionality for all your most-used features are hidden away behind hamburgers, and that lack of intuitive information scent slows you down, as does the greater effort to get to those things.
Everywhere you look, compromises are being made for touch that have negative effects for those of us who use pointing devices that actually make sense on a PC form factor (mouse or touchpad). Firefox recently got rid of its "compact" UI mode in favor of their touch-friendly, pixel-hogging versions, only to have the feedback be so resoundingly bad that they (in a rare turn of events) reversed themselves, but only if you edit the hidden pref to enable it first, and even then they felt the need to put "not supported" in the UI density dropdown, to passive-aggressively let you know You're Holding It Wrong. Ah, Mozilla... you can always be counted on to let your users know just how inconvenient they are.
That's the harm touch causes. A UI cannot simultaneously be optimal for touch and mouse, and if it tries to be, it will end up being crap on both of them. I am no Apple fan, but Tim Cook got it right when asked about this.
One thing I have always liked about my chosen desktop environment (KDE Plasma) is that it makes no compromises for touch, but there are signs that even that may be succumbing, with several changes coming along that are all about benefitting touch. If these things were beneficial to mouse users, one might wonder if they would have been added when mouse users were the only consideration.