Touchscreens have their place, but they have their limits too. The fact that Windows 8.1 is more mouse-friendly than Win8 was should tell you a little about those limits.
Now, bear with me for a moment….
The limits on personal computer size are dictated by input and output. Smartphones are the smallest practical computer at the moment for that reason; their screens are barely legible and their keyboards barely usable. And even then, you must choose between either a thick phone or giving up half your screen for a keyboard.
Now, the voice-activated interface that @hominid describes also has limits. Personally, I couldn’t use it in my car; I can’t even reliably use speakerphone since my car lacks the soundproofing that cars less than 20 years old have. ANd if you got a few peopel all talking to their computers all the time, there would be cacophony everywhere. Another limit is moving stuff; mice and touchscreens have a distinct edge over voice there.
There are other forms of interface on the horizon. Some rely on eye tracking; instead of “point and click”, they’re “look and shoot”. Google Glass has a bit of that. But the ultimate is a neural interface. Some may think it’s sci-fi, but we’ve actually done it a bit already; enough to prove it’s possible. We have cochlear implants that use a microphone and some electronics to stimulate nerves. We have wired cameras to the brains of blind people to give them enough vision to avoid walking into walls. We’ve made prosthetics that can crudely read nerve impulses directly.
Odds are that those will be refined to the point where our computer screens will be in our head (whether through modifying the eye, or just feeding the video signal right to the brain). Same with audio; who needs speakers when you can just play things into your auditory nerve? Typing might be a bit trickier, so that may require subvocalizations… but a sufficiently advanced computer with the right software could read the lip/tongue positions without requiring any actual speech.
So yeah, touchscreens are a fad, just as outhouses and whale-oil lamps were.
@Dutchess_III You’re rather old-fashioned. Quaintly so.