>The problem is that a touchpad is still fundamentally an indirect pointing device, rather than a direct pointing device like a touchscreen. As a counterpoint,

>The problem is that a touchpad is still fundamentally an indirect pointing device, rather than a direct pointing device like a touchscreen. As a counterpoint, cursor movement with a trackpad is just as indirect, yet we make the cursor move around directly with your finger. Why not make the cursor act like traditional scrolling? Treat the cursor like the contents of a scrollable view, and your finger motion acts like it's moving the viewport relative to the contents even though the cursor/page is actually moving while the screen/viewport is stationary? That sounds super weird, yeah? Having flipped my mental model to "one finger drags the cursor, two fingers drags the content", going back to "one finger drags the cursor, two fingers drags the viewport relative to the content" sounds similarly strange. >And ergonomically, it's easier to perform a down scroll on a touchpad with the non-"natural" scroll direction, because your fingers have more room to curl further than to straighten out when they're resting normally on the trackpad. Not really an issue; scrolling has momentum and requires very little movement. Give it a push and then put your fingers back down to stop it, it's not like a clicky mouse wheel where you have to scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll to go more than a few lines at a time.