Why do no Windows laptops have a trackpad as nice as the MBP?

Mostly because of vertical integration, and Apple being more vertically integrated in comparison to other PC manufacturers.

Simply put, when you design and build every single thing that goes into a complex product, you then have complete control over everything that makes up that product, and thus have complete control over that resulting product's quality. A more vertically integrated company is thus in a better position to make a better quality product - particularly so, because it has a better potential to address any quality issues stemming from where separate components interface.

Think about it, if you build an assembled product using parts sourced from third parties (ie you're not vertically integrated), you are somewhat at the mercy of third parties and the quality of their parts. On one end, this can be beneficial (or bad), as you can reap quality gains anytime you're vendors improve the quality of their parts (and vice versa).

But, generally speaking, vendors are only interested in the quality of their part/product, not necessarily your downstream product which sources their part/product as a component. As so, new quality problems can arise from integrating separate parts, of which your vendors may not care much to address, but you at times can't address them either (in the best possible way) because it would take slight changes to each of the vendor's products, at which you're at the mercy of your vendors to change but it's not really in their interest to do so. As so, from a holistic viewpoint (your assembled product), you can end up being stuck with a suboptimal solution (ie lower quality product).

Because there is no PC maker that cares about quality. Everything is about price and "value", which generally means price for specs, regardless of how well one can utilize those specs or how well things work.

The short answer is boring and won't win any PC vs Mac arguements online - it's about economies of scale. Nobody wants to design, manufacture and mass-produce a line of haptic trackpads unless they have an enormous lineup of machines that can use them. To Apple, the interests aligned and the investment paid off. Other manufacturers have tried the haptic trackpad route, but nobody has the tenure in that field that Apple does.

Despite that, I still share your sentiment. MacOS isn't a suitable environment for a lot of development work, and Apple makes no attempts to acknowledge of fix these gaps. Depending on your workload, maybe an Asahi Mac would work well? If you're just interested in a gesture-based workflow, KDE's Wayland session ships default with Asahi and is a great experience for gesture-lovers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBEsxTVRsEo&t=134s

My experience using KDE with a Magic Trackpad 2 has been excellent. I get the smooth scrolling and responsive gesture support I missed from MacOS, with constantly improving support in apps like Firefox, which recently got a great 1:1 pinch-to-zoom and two-finger-swipe back gesture. My only complaints come down to the price, fragility of the thing, and the Lovecraftian horror they list as a "Lightning port".

I've repeatedly heard about how great apple trackpads are over the years, and felt confused because I've never found the trackpads on non mac computers to be worse than macs. My theory is that profligate mac users try another computer, notice the trackpad is different from what they're used to, and decide that this difference amounts to being worse. Since nobody tunes their trackpads exactly like apple does, they are doomed to deciding that there is no trackpad as good as apple's.

Many Apple product niceties can be explained by the simple fact that Apple gets to control the hardware and the software of their products.

Simply said, Apple can write their OS, Userland, and drivers to play very nicely with the hardware that they select.

Even then they have issues sometimes, see the ridiculous thermal throttling you can experience on later Intel MacBooks.

Imo the trackpad on the Surface Book 2 is better than the trackpad on my 2023 Macbook Pro. The MacBook has a more noticeable delay before starting scrolling and sometimes misinterprets two finger clicks as one finger clicks.

I think the important things to look for are a glass trackpad running Windows Precision Trackpad Drivers.

I have felt many "significantly worse" on very, crappy systems. I feel there is a vast number which are similarly "premium" or very close, I can't tell the difference.

Are we sure that there is significant differences or is this just the Apple Halo effect in action ?

It seems like a big leap to go from "this other laptop trackpad isn't great" to "none MacBook trackpads all suck"

You tried one other and it wasn't good. This doesn't say anything about other trackpads.

Apple has little to no competition so they price their devices high and use high quality parts to justify it.

Windows laptops have much competition and is difficult to break even. So they use what ever works and give great value.

I love the trackpad and keyboard on my Asus G14.

Its also fast as stink... They even sell a variant with a mobile 4090 (which is an underclocked desktop 4080) now.

Microsoft Surface laptops are pretty close to MBPs.