[rbyers]

This is a complicated set of trade offs and I've argued on both sides of the fence so I can't pretend to imply the decision is at all clear cut. But let me respond to a couple details here.

First, the 'jQuery bloat' you're worried about looked like it was going to happen without Chrome native support: http://blog.jquery.com/2015/02/24/getting-on-point/. One of our goals in revisiting the decision was to avoid frameworks like jQuery having to include such polyfills to Chrome users.

The other thing is that we shouldn't assume Chrome doing Pointer Events means we won't also improve Touch Events. That's a complicated decision influenced in large part by participation by other browser vendors in the standards process around Touch Events.