The touchpad on my budget / performance Asus notebook does that just fine. Actually, MANY Synaptic touchpads support multi finger gestures; it's just that their Windows drivers are useless. In Linux, I have had two fingers to right click for ages. In the last year the driver has supported two-finger scrolling for my model, too. It now does this out of the box.
In addition, the previous Macbook also supported this except for the useless pinching and rotating gestures. (Which never seem to work anyway).
Oh, and my driver offers circular scrolling (iPod style), which is kind of cool but means sacrificing a corner of precious touchpad to become a scrolling hotspot.

The Synaptic driver for Windows purportedly supports gestures now (finally), but I could never get it to work. Probably involves opening the terminal (oops - sorry, the Run dialog) and typing in some incomprehensible commands :P

Thus, Apple, again did not invent "multitouch".


As for a small tablet like the N900, I also would prefer a sensitive resistive screen to a capacitive screen. By sensitive, I also happen to mean really pressure sensitive. This would allow for better web browser controls, for example. (An extremely light tap could be used to select stuff). You don't need multi-fingered gestures to improve usability. Just lots of user testing and focussed design with a reliable input mechanism.