Particularly compared to the touchpad, which falters at single-finger navigation, the pointing stick is impeccably precise when it comes to moving the cursor around screen.
But experiments using EEG have allowed people to do simple things like pressing buttons on a computer screen by moving a cursor and clicking it, and operating the flippers on a pinball machine.
For one, the touchpad offers a good deal of resistance, and moving the cursor where you want it to go can be a challenge: sometimes it stops short on the screen, and occasionally it moves in a different direction entirely.