The two last issues facing users switching are (imo) battery management and track pads. I know there are solutions but they're very complicated to setup properly for the average user.
And then kinetic scrolling is poorly supported. If you want it for every application you can turn it on at the driver level, but that doesn't work right because it is the wrong level to handle it at. It has no concept of your active application so it will continue your momentum between applications if you happen to alt-tab right after scrolling.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/libinput-Lua-Plugin-System
I'm thinking taking an existing laptop (say hp), installing debian variant.
I'd be intrigued what other options are out there as I'm trying to move the whole family over
Whether these advanced features are desirable is of course a matter of opinion. Personally, I find macbooks very hard to use because the trackpad never does what I want on account of having the motor skills of a spastic five year old. So I don't miss this at all.
On mac I disable nearly all gestures, I prefer the keyboard shortcuts.
You are right though, we're probably all talking about different aspects of trackpad usage.