Look at the slide notes on slide 6. They make a compelling technical and business argument against it; a reason the author acknowledges and dismisses because doesn't align with his thesis.
It seems worth noticing that this is more political than technological argument. Google choose not to implement Pointer Events and used Apple as a scapegoat.
I'm not happy with Apple's decision, but I'm even less happy with Google using Apple as some kind of feature implementation oracle.
This isn't Google using Apple as a feature implementation oracle, this is Google looking at pointer events using both their "web developer" and "browser developer" hats and reaching a disappointing conclusion.
As a web developer, Google would have to use Touch Events because that's all that Apple supports. Chrome already supports Touch Events. That covers the overwhelming majority of their touch-enabled users, with code they already have. Rewriting that to use a newer modern standard everywhere is one thing, but writing a second implementation with no path to sunsetting the first is much harder to justify.
Coming full circle, if Google's web developers aren't going to use Pointer Events for the forseeable future, it is hard to justify Google the browser developer putting them high on their priority list.
Thanks for the reply, honestly I haven't thought about Google as web developer. Another point that I unfortunately missed is that if Apple implemented Pointer Events in WebKit, then the changes could probably be ported very quickly to Blink (I guess both code bases are still largely similar).
You entirely missed this quote in the article. How do you explain that?