It's not the standards, it's the adoption.

@James Anderson - The XForms standard is a godsend for the forms developer. It's just a pity it's had such a retardedly slow uptake.

As an aside, however, the slow process of developing a standard is nothing in comparison to Microsoft's reticence to implement these standards.

You want a vector drawing standard? Here's SVG. And them Microsoft don't support it and create XAML instead.

You want some standards to work with XML documents? We're on XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, XQuery 1.0 etc. And then Microsoft don't support anything other than the severely restricted XPath 1.0. spec.

As a developer it's incredibly frustrating when a standard you want to use exists but you are unable to adopt it yourself due to inadequate support. I don't want to be pushed into using proprietary systems, so I'm stuck with the same tools I had in 2001.

The standards body shouldn't make it any more difficult for adoption or implementation, because this is the biggest problem that exists right now for web developers. Bring on XHTML.

But Apple have already made touchpads obsolete

This patent is redundant.

There is already visual feedback on (almost) all touch screen implementations. By essentially retrofitting this concept to a touchpad - that is, giving it some form of 'screen' functionality - Apple are not creating anything new at all. They don't deserve to be granted this patent, but they'll probably get it.

I'll agree with a few other posters that backlighting is useful, though. I love touch-surface technology and Apple do it really well.

However

...you'd have loved to say he was placed on garden leave.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave)