Yawn.
As far back as the 1990's Apple has always envisioned a completely touch dedicated device/s.
For creative, artistic work, the mouse/trackpad/trackballs have always been, arguably, the more diffucult input devices to use.
That is why a company like Wacom came along and why most artists use some form of electronic drawing tablet and stylus combination to be able to more freely express themselves artistically and digitally on a computer.
For more mundane things why is a mouse/trackpad more superior to actual physical touch or stylus touch on a computer screen?
Your argument about putting fingerprints on the screen is not really an argument, but personal preference.
Fingerprints do not really show up on a backlit computer screen.
They only show up when the screen as dark/asleep.
I am going to date myself here, but back in late 1970's to about mid 1980's or so, I worked on a mainframe computer/CAD system that used a wired (later infrared, “wireless” ) light pen stylus that you put onto and used right on a cathode ray comouter screen for drawing and for other types of text data input.
When Apple introduced the Macintosh and the mouse in 1984 ( the Apple Lisa actually had introduced the mouse first ), that is when many former computing input devices went the way of the Dodo and computer companies started to standardised on a mouse or mouse/digitiser combination.
At that time,there was a learning curve to using a mouse with the hand/eye coordination needed.
Using that light pen on an actual computer screen was more natural and far easier to understand and use on the computer screen and it was a pretty accurate pointing device at that time, too.
Apple is not going to change course on this issue any time soon!
It is already 11 years, now. STILL no mice/trackpads/trackballs support.
These old school input devices WILL be going away at some near future date and I bet it will happen within the rest of my lifetime.
And it will NOT be easy to implement mice/trackpad/trackball support now, as developers would have to modify their apps for touch/mice/trackpad/trackball support, as well.
You might as well just use a more powerful REAL computer with more power, more powerful full computer apps/programs that use all of these standard input devices.
OR
Sell your iPad and switch to a Microsoft Surface/Surface Pro product if you need a tablet computer with built-in stylus/ mice/trackpad/trackball support.
AND, Microsoft Surface products also included support for the Microsoft Surface Dial, as well.
It is bad enough that virtually most iPad users, for that last 8 YEARS are too lazy to learn how to type and input using iOS’s virtual software keyboard, which, BTW, has a very nifty built-in trackpad feature that works just super for everything that people posting/complaining here about external mouse/trackpad support, would want to do.
