>>Anyway, there are sub-1000 touchscreen machines that are nice, like the dell xps 12, but its obvious the vendors consider touchscreens a premium feature. They

>>Anyway, there are sub-1000 touchscreen machines that are nice, like the dell xps 12, but its obvious the vendors consider touchscreens a premium feature. They're wrong. Laptops no longer have the luxury of not shipping with touchscreens, at any price point. Even apple gets this wrong, something which amazes me. Imagine someone trying to sell a tablet with a trackpad instead of a touchscreen. The very idea is ridiculous. Every reason you want touch on your tablet also applies to your laptop. Apple did usability studies on this very issue and came to the conclusion that combining a mouse and keyboard with a touch display didn't work. The screen was too far away to make using a touch device comfortable for a long period of time. Of course, figuring out how to design software that works both with a mouse/keyboard system and touch devices is a challenge. I'm not sure Windows 8 has succeeded here. I don't enjoy the metro environment when I'm using a mouse and keyboard and I don't like the desktop when I switch over to a windows 8 tablet. I'm a bit mystified by all the hype about touchscreen laptops. The use cases for tablets and notebooks are just too different and I feel that Microsoft is making the classic mistake of trying to cram as much features as possible into a product without understanding how these devies are actually used. For one consumer confusion is likely to result with the plethora of different configurations that Windows 8 devices are sold in. This a recipe for bewilderment. I still feel that Microsoft would have been much better off developing a tablet version of windows phone 8 rather than extending the desktop down to the tablet market. Now the desktop and tablet version of windows are joined together and Microsoft won't be able to respond to changing market conditions as quickly.