This laptop actually has a pointing stick with three mouse buttons above the trackpad

Did not notice that, the trackpoint is my number 1 requirement for a laptop. The other is the ability to completely disable the track pad via BIOS. Many do not allow that anymore, but I usually can disable it using xinput.

And of course the # 2 requirement is no Nvidia anything :) If it has both Nvidia and Intel graphics, Nvidia must be able to be disabled using BIOS.