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I used an x220 as my primary machine for a long time. The low resolution screen and the unusually crappy touchpad are what got me to upgrade.

The touchpad in particular was horrible because it had different resolutions in X and Y. In one of those (I don't remember which) it was lower than the screen. So I found myself frequently unable to get to the 1 pixel wide handles to resize windows without the wigglestick.

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I turned the touchpad off on my x220 and simply used the track point.

I've always enjoyed being multimodal. There were workarounds but I didn't like not having access to a useful touchpad. It seemed like a clear hardware problem because I had the same problem in Windows as in all desktop environments in Linux.

I'm not sure which DE you're using, but many have a simple shortcut (in XFCE it's something like Alt+click) to resize windows with the keyboard. Becomes very natural to use and much less fiddly than the touchpad alone.

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