I love the fact that they responded to feedback and adjusted their design accordingly. While the original concept of a programmable touch screen interface in the center of the controller was pretty cool, in practice it was unwieldy.
Controllers are meant to be interacted with by touch. You should never have to look at it. A touch screen interface is completely useless for this type of interaction.
The entire point of the clickable touchscreen, as I recall, was that resting your finger on it would bring up an overlay on the monitor, mirroring what was shown on the touchscreen.
You would then move your finger to hover over what you wanted to select, then click down the touchscreen. All without ever having to look at the actual touchscreen, since it was all mirrored up on the monitor.
Correct. They then realized that they could take the screen part of it out, and then they realized that they already have a touchpad on the left and right sides.
That use case would be easily covered by the touchpads and buttons though - your argument for a touchscreen is so the user wouldn't ever have to look at it; so why does it ever need to emit an image?
that sounds weird/pointless. i wonder if they tried using the touchscreen as an absolute-position locator for the cursor. that would have been legit, assuming the screen had that kind of fidelity in the first place... which it probably didn't.
there is always the center of the contact area, which is a single point. it would certainly take getting used to though, and the data would probably have to be run through some kind of annealing
My hunch is that they removed it because of cost, not usability. That touchscreen seems like an expensive part to put in a $30-50 controller. This is all just my guess, though.
This is the reason I opted not to get Lenovo's new X1 Carbon ultrabook; it replaces the function keys with a programmable touchscreen like that, which I think inhibits usability.
Controllers are meant to be interacted with by touch. You should never have to look at it. A touch screen interface is completely useless for this type of interaction.