It depends on what your most comfortable with I suppose. How many people are really going to want to move their entire arm to make a pointer move? I don't see it catching on very fast. Why would I want to give up my easy to move mouse to lift my entire arm to move a pointer like in Minority Report?
A very important question. In fact, if you think of real life, you reach out and touch things, walk across a room and pick something up. BUT watch a fantasy or magic show, and we all want to make the tiniest gestures with our fingers and have what we want float across to us.
In the computer world... the mouse conveys our magic tiny gesture to make big movements on the screen. In that sense, why would you ever want to lift your arm to touch the screen... it's so much quicker and easier to grab the mouse (and you don't have to clean the screen afterwards).
And yet, I believe touch is a huge part of our near future. I'm not exactly sure why... let's see.... hmmm!
Of course, the touch is more natural than the mouse, for anyone untrained.
I think the main thing is that the mouse can only ever point at one thing at a time. A finger can also only point at one thing at a time (and a mouse on Windows can have 2 types of click!)... but what happens when you can use multiple fingers or even 2 hands? Basically, it enables a whole raft of new interface methods.
Note that the best way of making touch useless is making it work like a mouse. You can still only click one thing, and it's harder to do that!
What Apple (& MS) do with Multitouch will be intriguing.
is only covering X and Y, while the big M is putting big money in the 'Z'
