Of these, I would have to get the Lenovo, since that's the only one with physical trackpad buttons!
IMHO the buttons only made sense with the trackpoint and to be honest, that was more of a nuisance than a feature on the Thinkpads and Sony Vaios that I owned. Ever since scrolling became the most important user interaction, things changed dramatically.
And things aren't looking good there, mostly because
gestures are entirely inconsistent across the input devices.
My main PCs are big workstations with huge displays. Those quite simply come as mouse & keyboard-only devices, and there I mostly need a good scrolling wheel and the back button for the thumb: the full-screen toggle is rarely used, because there is enough screen real-estate available. And there is much less need to toggle/flip between apps, as I keep things on different halves, quadrants or just the second 43" screen I typically have on standby on my desk and just move my focus and mouse to a different area.
Apart from travel use, my laptops are mostly surfing and some writing, but because the screen is so small that implies multiplexing, more scrolling, the urge to toggle to full screen on the active browswer window and generally to flip (not move) between apps or just groups of browser windows.
And actually I spend most of my laptop time while having a meal, which is why it was originally Android tablets: I don't like food inside my keyboads and glass touchscreens clean very nicely with the same wipes that I also use for my glasses.
When I broke my shiny Galaxy Tab on some icy stairs, I decided to go with a convertible laptop instead, because on the road the tablet was an extra device and tablets stopped being cheap long ago. Which is why today for me a laptop needs to be convertible, even if it were to be a beefy desktop replacement. And that has four major input devices with keyboard, mouse, touchpad and touch screen.
And that brings me to gestures, the real crux on Windows (but also on Linux).
I still
have mice and keyboards on every computer and I am generally rarely in a situation (cramped on-knees-only) where I can't use a mouse: for precision pointing, it's hard to beat, but that is becomes less of a necessity. So touchpads and touch screens are nearly always
extra options, which I use when they are superior to mice and keys. And that's clearly the case in the case of scrolling through web pages or longer texts: nothing beats a touch screen in terms of precision and smooth scrolling (which is much less of an issue on my huge desktops screens, which typically operate in a dual column upright/tall mode).
And it has the added advantage of letting me do the scrolling with one of the fingers not in the food arena, which would be much harder if not impossible on the mouse. While the touchpad is folded away with the keyboard during food ops, it will usually come back out, once I transition into coffee or beverages-only mode, without necessarily leaving the table.
With touch screen, touch pad and mouse available for scrolling, I find myself using the touchpad a little more, especially when it's mixed with text entry, just because it avoid taking my hands far from the keyboard: I can go back to the home keys and start typing without ever taking my eyes of the screen. And the touchpad is almost as precise for scrolling than the touch screen, typically better than the mouse wheel, where I have to basically run a "roll-to-scroll" adjustment cycle on every input device switch. That may partially be necessary because a non-clicky wheel on my mice never works: they either start scrolling things unintentionally when I start touching the wheel again or continue, once I let go. And that implies a scroll jump.
But now really back to gestures: the main issue is that scrolling, going back on a browser, full-screen toggle and windows swaps are very hard to get personalized and consistent on touch-screens and touch-pads or even across mice.
Windows simply doesn't permit adjusting touch screen gestures, while it's every vendor to himself on touch pads and mice. I make do with a 3rd party gesture control app, but some of the worst are really the various application generations Logitech employs for their various types of mice, where I have corded variants on the desktop and distinct cordless variants and generations for laptops or notebooks: Downloads of several hundred megabytes for a mouse driver hint quite heavily towards putting "know your customer" over "serve your customer".
On Linux gesture customization just tends to be years behind or non-existing.
But coming back to your comment: physical buttons on a touchpad make no sense whatsoever to me any more. The only sensible way forward that I see is to treat the touchpad as much like a touch screen as possible and ensure that gestures between the two are synchronized.
Nothing good can come from someone trying to click on a touch screen!
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