From my point of view this is (at least) being addressed in the SDK; the hildon stuff (gtk/Qt touch enhancements) is adding finger-scrolling to use the entire window as a scroll surface.
The xterm switched from finger-scroll to text-select; gtk has a pannablearea widget and I wrote an extension to Qt to make ordinary scrollareas gain fingerability.

Additionally there's a lot of real-estate gained by making the scrollbars indicators rather than functional bars.