Well my grief with the touchpad was really when it came to frontend work. or even just scrolling through lines of code was a pain as it was too sensitive in every way. This kind of behaviour makes any kind of interaction a pain. Not that you can't live with it, but just knowing that the same hardware performs hundred times better on another OS...
The tipping point for me was more about the absolute lack of user friendliness when it comes to setting it up. I've spent days to understand xinput, find the properties that I need to change (with non-existent documentation) and then spend time on finding the best values for them.
And then upgrading distribution version negated all the effort I've put into it, by changing a lot of things and was back to square one.
As I wrote in a previous reply on this thread, the touchpad was the final straw in a long uphill battle. A lot of grief came from the lack of user friendly configuration of anything within the system. And when you start editing configuration files and reading forums on a regular basis, that makes one realise that he/she is spending more time on making life easier then actually living it. And this is with one of the most user friendly distributions, or so do they say.
Anyway, I was very disappointed and still am. It's been 18-19 years since I've been introduced to Linux and used it on many occasions, but some things don't seem to change, or take a long period of time to change. I understand it comes from the Open Source-ness of the whole thing, where people take their own time and energy to make something better for free.