Your getting too much into personal preference now. If your going to buy a laptop then buy external everything you may as well just buy a desktop.
A touchpad has a learning curve (its only a trackpad if its an IBM, thats their name for a touchpad) just like a mouse had a learning curve when we first got them. I paid for my very first laptop in 1998, before that I had company assigned ones or ones that came from the trash bin, I've used touchpads and haven't bought or used a mouse since then. Synaptics makes the best touchpads, though Alps has nearly caught up, the apls touchpad in my katest company laptop is useabe, the trick is to crank the speed up so your not using multiple movements to get from one end of the screen to another then for fine movement you roll the finger back and forth a little bit. I turn off all the extra stuff, scorlling, pinching, squeezing, any other gestures they come with to get the whole pad area.
Now if your going to take the advice of some and buy a $400-500 don't plan on using it as a laptop much, those have the most flimsy cases, weakest hinges, worst cooling, etc and are pretty much stuck to a desk. Those are the $5 chinses made pocket knife that breaks the first time you use it. The business machines are the swiss army knives and leathermans, they may not have the best sound cards or other fancy gadgets you find in ones you buy in the retail stores but they have stonger cases, hinges, cooling designed to run hours at a time, etc.
Netbooks are not as limited as some make them out to be. I haven't owned a desk in years, out laptops have always sat on the end of the couch (again buy business models that can still keep the inside cool) and the next step for us was netbooks. I replaced my 1.2GHz 12" machine with a 1.6GHz 9" netbook and it works great. Its my only home machine right now not counting my 500MHz file server used to dump backups to. I run all my garmin software, keep up with a dozen or so forums, have years worth of mail and pictures (past the 30G mark of pictures) track all my projects, tools, etc on spreadsheets and have nearly a dozen other OS's running as virtual machines; need windows 7, windows server 2008 R2, Solaris 10, etc I just start up a virtual and there it is. I haven't found anything yet I needed a larger system for.