Has Apple found the magic Touch?

Cnet's Tom Krazit takes an interesting look at Apple's development of the multi- touch user interface.
As of this morning Apple also updated its line of Macbooks and expended its multi touch technology into the notebooks carrying it from the iPhone, and iPod touch and of course the highly profile Macbook air.

The question now is whether this is something that will boost Mac sales, which have been doing pretty well on their own up to this point. It's hard to assess the impact of the multitouch technology in the early days of the MacBook Air, which has only been out a little over a month and appeals to only a subset of the notebook-buying population.

It's clear, however, that the iPhone's multitouch user interface is perhaps its greatest asset. And Synaptics, which makes TouchPads used in a wide variety of notebooks PCs, expects several PC vendors to introduce similar technology later this year on their own notebooks.

Wired brought up an interesting point last week, however, as it looked into Apple's chances of patenting this technology. Apple secretly acquired Fingerworks, a company started by two professors at the University of Delaware, in 2005 in order to get its hands on the MultiTouch fingertip recognition technology.

If Apple is successful with its patent efforts, and other PC and smartphone companies develop their own gesture-recognition technology in response, we could see a world where pinching on a MacBook might zoom, but the same gesture might close a window on a ThinkPad, or open a file on a mobile phone.