The main bottleneck for PC touchpads has always been the poor quality of the hardware (for example, using low-bandwidth PS2 connections). The Microsoft specification is a hardware specification (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn...). All the hardware provides is a stream of raw input data. It's up to the OS to process that data intelligently.
"Hardware specification" sounds like it's designing the shape and size of an ATX motherboard.
That set of documents appears to be largely focused on the HID protocol for data transfer between a Microsoft-certified touchpad and the driver, not a specification for the hardware design per se.
With that said, open, freely licensed, and non-patent-encumbered protocols are vitally important and it's awesome that Microsoft has stepped up and shown leadership.. if that's what that is. Microsoft has been doing more and more impressive things to work with the open-source community since Ballmer, and that'd be great if that's what it is.
