yes, I don't know why our friends at Lenovo took it out of their lower priced models and , too, please pester Lenovo, there is still so many ways the TrackPoint can be improved, it is worth the small development effort it would take!
The middle button was added to placate my obsession with a second pointing device. We showed that you could use the middle button to accomplish what all my two TrackPoint prototypes did... they went for it... but ... i am sorry to say ... the scrolling consistency and control somehow (still) gets hijacked by Windows in some ways ... it should be revisited.
Right, the interesting story was toshiba, who constantly would come buy to pretend to buy TrackPoints... then try to learn enough to "fix thiers" ... even though I had published much of the secrets, others never made copies that were good enough to matter.
From the beginning, I encouraged people to use mice for constant pointing, and TrackPoint for mixed typing and pointing... one reduction in stress came with the (won over 4 years) introduction of the wrist wrest in the thinkpads of the 770 time frame... notebooks from most companies before that (like the 750, 755, etc) promoted that the notebook should be the size of an A4 piece of paper and that moving the keyboard towards the display was somehow evil... (even though apple had wrist wrests)...
consider using buttons from one hand for buttons and the other for pointing , it helps.
First, its true!, we showed Apple that the trackpoint is at least 20% faster than the trackpad for text editing,,, they said... "yeah but its ibm not apple's branded input device"... apple is still a marketing company
At first the trackpoint catapulted IBM into a new and important market, moving them from not being able to sell even a few thousand laptops a year, to selling billions of dollars of them a year... SO THEY WOULDN'T LET US SELL THE POINTING DEVICE TO ANYONE, EVEN THOUGH THEY WANTED IT... FOR TWO YEARS.
by then their were 5 copycats ... that sucked... sullying the TrackPoint luster... so they let us sell it.... but it was a bit late and the price IBM charged was a bit tough to pay...
still: at least HP, Zenith, TI, SONY, used the real thing for a while
Dell did licence it for some of their machines BUT,,,, they put these really stiff buttons on them that were like 5 times as stiff in the front as in the back... bad buttons can completely negate all productivity gains... Dell was told,,, and i would be happy ... even now ... to help ,,, some have conjectured that Dell put the TrackPoint in to get people to move away from the ThinkPad, and when it didn't work, they would "get used to the pad" and not pay the premium for ThinkPad again...
the cup shaped one was first developed for a a thumb based handle we made for flight traffic controllers. In those days (1991) we thought a cup in a keyboard would be too big.
Actually the new placement bellow not between the g and h key (long before it was a product) made the space for it... but we were to timid for the big style tops for years. the first ones were a chloroniated butyl that replace the awful protoypes that were slippery santoprene%$&$#,,,, but the very sticky butyl (that saved the product from sure death) were actually formulated by my father as the last consulting gig of his life...
unfortunately they absorbed oil over a few months from fingers ... I tried everything and the bumpy one is nylon trying to mimic the amazingly gripy fish skin we found in Japan... the larger cup and domes of today are better still!