A mouse is still much better than a touchpad. It was the real pain when I had no working mice at home.
I believe people are productive because they feel comfy with that, but some prefer strict minimalism. I'm somewhere in between I guess.
The mainstream OSs are trying to make the user type as little as possible. Just drag, click, and voila. But when it comes to Linux, if you take the advantage of precise control of your system within the terminal, you have to switch between the keyboard and the mouse all the time if you use a traditional desktop environment, so the advantage of drag-and-click simplicity vanishes.