Conversely, my 7 year old daughter dramatically prefers her guest account on my touchscreen laptop as opposed to the non-touch Chromebook we had intended for her to use. She just has a hard time wrapping her head around the idea of a screen that doesn't do anything when you touch it.
I actually always thought the part of "the mother of all demos"[1], where "the mouse" is introduced is a bit awkward, like they know it's a poor hack. Just because we've got a lot of mileage out of it, doesn't mean it's a great input solution. One IMNHO good indication of that is that children (not just your daughter :) seem to overwhelmingly seem to prefer touch input.
I'm mostly in agreement with the article, but the author also misses some things, I think:
> Yes, the iPad Pro has a very fancy stylus. That’s great for artists, but the vast majority of people aren’t artists and don’t care.
> Yes, the iPad Pro has a very fancy, true-to-color screen. That’s great for artists, but the vast majority of people aren’t artists and don’t care.
I think good touch and pen input really still is the obvious better way to input. It doesn't work well (enough) without a few decades of UI engineering and real-world testing -- but a "real" digital drawing pad and touch interface is probably a very sensible way to spend the improvements Moore's law have given us: My Amiga 2000 had 4?MB of ram and a 7Mhz processor, my current desktop has four cores at 4Ghz and 16GB of RAM. Using some of that to go from 4096 colours and 320x256 to 24bit 4K or 8k along with real-time input in the form of free-form painting/writing seems reasonable.
Just because it's so hard to paint with a mouse that most computer users aren't digital artists, while everyone that's been given pen and paper will have at doodled is a great indication that we need better input for our digital devices. As for the better screen - I think getting pixel resolution on par with print resolution can only be a good thing. Personally I find it much more comfortable to read a thousand pages at high dpi, than at "standard" +/- 1080p on a 20-24" monitor.
