Gestures or Mouse - in OS X Lion

We all saw OS X Lion; it’s touch and gesture based, it resembles iOS big time.

Maybe this resemblance makes me see the mouse cursor as something that does not belong there anymore. Swiping, tapping, page-scrolling and so on are the enemies of the cursor. When migrating to a gesture based UI you lose the focus of a cursor and concentrate on areas, tabs and apps. The spot goes out, the zone comes in.

The only place a cursor is irreplaceable is in-app usage: when dealing with fonts, lines, dots, pixels and millimeters you cannot use zones, but spots.

I know Jobs is very found of his invention (the mouse), but migrating to a gesture interface should imply the cursor to be repositioned as precision instrument instead of a main interaction denominator.

You may be thinking the cursor could be dethroned by gestures and touch in iOS because in iOS you touch where and what you see. But having no better ideas never stopped Apple.

Using a touch pad instead of a touch screen can be much easier if correct markers are defined.