The multitouch trackpad for me is a great way to get the eye candy of having linear animations tied to your finger movement. In a practical sense, I use linear animations in MacOS to “peek” between desktops and pages in Safari all the time. The fact of the matter is that linear animations are just far smoother, and useful than ones that snap into place from a single input trigger. I even have a trackpad for my home desktop setup and literally don’t use my traditional mouse unless I’m playing a game that doesn’t support controllers.

A good example of this is to compare Windows’s app exposé with the MacOS one. In Windows when you swipe up (or down? I forget which one) with 4 (3?) fingers, once you hit a certain point the app exposé just appears no matter how slow or fast you’re doing the gesture. On MacOS, you can do the app expose gesture on the trackpad as slow or as fast as you want and it’ll animate in time with the speed of your fingers doing the gesture.