But I am aware of "things" that have been available for ever but never wanted to interact with them until someone like Apple sell me the idea.
Ideas are one thing. What Apple does well is implementation. Look at the Magic Mouse. While I have no specific knowledge of the existence of any particular multi-touch mouse that preceded the Magic Mouse, I fully expect that someone else probably came up with the idea or their own model first. And I'm sure some eager MR reader will take immense pleasure in revealing who.
But what Apple did was make the multi-touch mouse standard on their desktops, a multi-touch trackpad standard on their laptops, and then baked multi-touch directly into the OS - not just the Finder, but the standard apps, and the APIs for developers, and implemented gestures that were both logical and natural.
People wailed and gnashed their teeth over the new gestures introduced in Lion, rushing to "un-reverse" the scroll direction. But now, I can't remember a time when I wasn't multi-touch swiping, scrolling and zooming my way around any of my Macs. And I'm someone who already -and still- heavily navigated through Finder with the keyboard, typing parts of file/folder names and using command-key sequences to take actions. Just absent mindedly rubber-banding the contents of a window with a couple of flicks of your fingers while waiting on the phone or trying to think of a solution to a problem... these are the sorts of little joys Windows users are unable to understand.
Windows, while always clunky and awkward is even more so now. Put a Lenovo keyboard and mouse (as is the standard for Windows PCs at my work) and Windows 7 in front of me and my productivity halves (at least). The towering keys, the bulky, unresponsive, uninstinctive mouse with too many buttons that require too much thought, the lack of multi-touch gestures, the awkward window-heavy interface (seriously, after 5 minutes I have 12 Windows Explorer windows open, of only 3 unique folders, because everything gets in the way of everything else) that seems to strongly discourage simply dragging things where you want them (in preference for cut/copy/pasting).
My point being that what Apple's selling you is not the idea, it's the
implementation. Part of their strength in making "the whole widget" - both the device itself, and the OS and APIs that can best take advantage of the device.
has done it right with the new pad, it'll easily be the new standard IMO.
