It's interesting that you talk about a PC "at home", but it's actually just a cheap laptop. I only use laptops when travelling; weight and size then are far more important than performance. High-performance laptops, IMO, are for laypeople who can't afford two machines, students and homeless consultants. My PC, on the other hand, is liquid cooled for reduced noise, has SSD, 32GB of RAM, 680 GTX graphics, 2 monitors (limited by desk space), etc., and generally performs far better than anything in a mobile form factor. Windows "experience index" is 7.9 across the board except for CPU/memory at 7.8.
Pretty much all trackpads suck. Apple's big glass trackpads, when running OS X rather than Windows, are the best implementation I've seen, but mostly because the two-finger gesture scrolling is so slick - it's continuous, rather than anything for Windows which is stuck with discrete mouse wheel up / down buttons. (Mouse wheel movements are not continuous.) Apple trackpads are great for reading single long web pages, but when you need lots of fine control, particularly while maintaining a dragging operation, they too suck horribly. They're not a decent alternative to a mouse.
FYI almost all synaptics touchpads (ie almost all) have supported 2-finger scrolling for years. Not even specifically multi-touch hardware needed. Update your drivers @ synaptics.
The problem isn't in hardware or drivers. It's in Windows and the application ecosystem. Even though Windows WM_MOUSEWHEEL allegedly supports fine-grained control, in practice it isn't implemented anywhere, not by vendors, not by applications.
(That is, I think you missed my point. The reason Apple's support is good is not because it's multi-touch; it's because it's continuous. It's also multi-touch in Windows using the Bootcamp driver - my MacBook Air spends most of its time running Windows - but it is still discrete.)
Is Synapatics a hardware maker or a software maker? Every PC laptop touchpad I've ever used was crap compared to the MacBook, and I don't know if that's Synaptics' fault.
Pretty much all trackpads suck. Apple's big glass trackpads, when running OS X rather than Windows, are the best implementation I've seen, but mostly because the two-finger gesture scrolling is so slick - it's continuous, rather than anything for Windows which is stuck with discrete mouse wheel up / down buttons. (Mouse wheel movements are not continuous.) Apple trackpads are great for reading single long web pages, but when you need lots of fine control, particularly while maintaining a dragging operation, they too suck horribly. They're not a decent alternative to a mouse.