For me, nothing is worse than a laptop that has a bad keyboard of trackpad. Poor travel, poor gesture recognition, and other problems can ruin the experience. I think nothing is worse than a keyboard with small Shift keys or a small Backspace key, or a trackpad that jumps without warning and makes clicking difficult. Even some manufacturers that make the best trackpads and keyboards most of the time can make ones that are terrible. I have an Asus C200 with the best laptop keyboard I've ever used, and then another Asus laptop (that's more high end) has a terrible keyboard. It makes no sense.
That's one reason in particular that I am a huge fan of Lenovo/IBM laptops - they have the best keyboards and track pads in my opinion. Their keyboard in particular is very nicely designed right down to the individual keys themselves, which are low profile, but have a really nice subtle curve to them to help keep you from slipping over and hitting the wrong keys. I hate how some other competitors keyboards, such as HP's. have really tiny Up and Down arrow keys, which are clumsy for people like me who use them a lot, as well as many other keyboard shortcuts. A few years ago I picked up a super cheap but brand new HP laptop, just to tide me over temporarily because my main computer had just died and I needed something in the interim until I had enough money to buy a full fledged powerful replacement computer. Strangely, the laptop had no clearly defined trackpad. It was "there", but basically just underneath the exterior casing, which had a cross-hatched embossed pattern on it, similar to what you would see on metal sheets. Within the first hour of using it, my fingers were already raw from dragging them over this patterned surface, I knew I was going to have to return it. It was clearly to make the laptop look more sleek and minimal, but from a functionality standpoint, it really sucked.
