While I was at Microsoft last week, I was using my laptop as my computing platform, and using it pretty much 18 hours per day. After spending a week messing around with the "Trackpad" on my IBM T41, I finally got it to work as designed in the last couple of days. In the meantime, I was using a little mini-wheelmouse as my primary pointing device.
Although I've had a scrollwheel on various of my mice for perhaps 5 years, it's never really been something I used or wanted to use. Now, for some reason, I'm all over it…
I'm not sure why it finally clicked. Perhaps it was partly because every X desktop I use now supports scrolling pretty much "out of the box". Perhaps it is the near-ubiquity of scrolling pointing devices. All I know is that when I got back to work and found that my ancient three button mouse in my office doesn't have a scrollwheel, I felt crippled. I'm seriously considering buy Trackpads for all my desktop boxes so that I can get the horizontal scroll area, and so that I can get more sensitive/direct scrolling than the clicky scrollwheels afford. I'm hooked.
It is remarkable to me that professional input devices today have less control surfaces than the Defender machine I played on as a kid. We thought those controls were horribly complex—for about 30 minutes. I'm finding that my perceived bandwidth just jumps through the roof when I don't have to twiddle from control to control.
I've always been a "more buttons and knobs" kind of guy, but I'm still a little surprised at the suddenness of my transition. Maybe next I'll figure out GIT.