Microsoft has gone “all in” with touch on Windows 8. Part of the reason for the radical redesign of the interface in Windows 8 / Windows RT was to make the “touch unfriendly” Windows 95 through Windows 7 (designed for a mouse and keyboard) so that it worked better with mouse / keyboard and touch. You could use Windows 7 with your finger, but it wasn’t as seamless as using navigating around with a mouse.
Once you use touch, especially with a laptop, you miss it when it isn’t present on other devices.
So what’s Apple going to do? Are they going to ignore being able to touch the screen as an interface option for OSX on Macbook Air and Macbook Pro?
My guess is that they won’t and that we’ll see a touch Retina Macbook Pro sometime in the next 18 months. There isn’t many good reasons not to move to mouse/keyboard/touch on laptop computers – though I’m sure that we’ll hear arguments from Mac Fans about how “touchscreens on laptops are sub optimal” – sort of like the same arguments about how PPC was a better architecture than i386 – until OSX went i386 and everything i386 was now cool.
