So this little guy is the Microsoft Touch Mouse. got this funky little grid of touch points on it that make where on the surface you click contextual, instead of standard clicking, as well as support for various mouse gestures with 1, 2 or 3 fingers and thumb swipes. It was originally made for Windows 7, but got recent support for Windows 8 and added gestures to work with the new Metro UI in there.
my old mouse decided it wanted to disconnect and reconnect ~30 seconds starting yesterday no matter what USB port it was plugged in to, so it was time for a new mouse. I'd heard about this mouse and thought getting it would be rather neat since I use Windows 8, but its normal price of $80 was more than I wanted to pay for a mouse in an emergency replacement so it wasn't on my mind for going to buy a mouse yesterday. however, it turns out for some unknown reason Staples and Office Max list its normal price as half that instead. Staples was online only but the Office Max near me had one in stock, so a quick trip and $40 and I had the mouse.
its a wireless mouse, with a little USB receiver thing to use it (I thought it was Bluetooth going into it but its not). you dont have to actually install any drivers for basic mouse function either, they've got the touch net rigged to send basic mouse commands trying to use it so you don't have to worry about not being able to use it upon first plugging it in. I don't know about the gestures without install, as I didn't even know what the gestures for Win8 are as its packaged and sold as "Exclusively for Windows 7".
As far as the Windows 8 gestures go, the default gestures are configured with ones for zooming in and out of the Start Screen, one to open the Charms menu (highly useful in Win8 desktop as well because thats where your shutdown is), a gesture for cycling through running Metro apps, and back and forward gestures. You can change the overall behavior in the configuration app, as well as setting app-specific ones too.
Its standard gestures also have the whole thing enabled as a scroll area if you want for browsing, and you can set different scroll speeds for the normal areas and for the "scroll strip" in the center where a scroll wheel traditionally is. one complaint I have is they dont have a click for the scroll strip for clicking the wheel, which is a major browser shortcut for opening new tabs these days. I didn't realize how much I use this until I didn't have it anymore, so I ended up putting that on one of the thumb gestures (since I don't like having back/forward on my mice anyway). also, I just noticed, for some strange reason there's a tips ticker at the bottom of the configuration app, which is clearly written for Win8 by the Metro-like style, but it's telling the default Win7 gestures.
So anyway, that's that. Its not a bad mouse. A little learning curve at first because its only one click for the whole unit so the way you have your fingers might mess it up, but it is a little forgiving and weighs it for regular clicking if you have several fingers on the pad as long as one's on the normal click button. $80 at everywhere except for Staples and Office Max, where it's randomly $40 instead.
http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/touch-mouse/3KJ-00001
Then again, anything with more than 2 buttons would drive my fingers nut 
