From what I gathered, it's actually another thing: there is a large volume of people using misconfigured or simply bad software with their perfectly fine hardwa

From what I gathered, it's actually another thing: there is a large volume of people using misconfigured or simply bad software with their perfectly fine hardware touchpads. Apple ones, that are actually well configured out-of-the-box, then "feel" better and more precise, and clueless people incorrectly blame their hardware for sub-par experience. Been there, done that. I've blamed a touchpad of my work machine (which was actually a higher model of the same line as my personal laptop), but it turned out it used a different software driver (accidentally - I've swapped their SSDs and it turned out that the quality of their touchpads swapped as well :D). Also, both of these touchpads felt simply awful on Windows. After that I've spend some time figuring it out and it turns out that these days it's actually hard to get a crappy touchpad (unless you pay really crappy money for a whole machine). It's all in software.