Rumor is, some IBM sales rep somewhere at some point in history managed to put pointing stick into a procurement requirement for professional laptops, so to make only ThinkPads to be qualified. Many agencies are not capable of drafting good requirements on their own and such skewed requirements written by the winning contractor to exclude competitors are sadly common.

There is always a model or two in every laptop manufacturer's mobile workstation lineups with a pointing stick, for that reason. Not often is in consumer or non-workstation business laptops, and I was never impressed with one, but there always is one.