[HW] Clicking requires too much force

See the OODA loop lessons of F16 vs MiG for why a low-force click matters even if we discount the long-term health issues:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/boyds-law-of-iteration.html

As an alternative you may use trackpad "tap to click" and the "Menu" button on the keyboard (between Right ALT and Right CTRL) to emulate left and right mouse buttons. In general we have not seen any "push to click" trackpads which work better; even Apple ones on the new MacBook and MacBook Air (glass trackpad) are kind of clumsy to push to click, and tap to click is much preferred.

As a hint for tap-to-click users, tapping then tapping again quickly and dragging will effect holding down left mouse button to drag an item such as a window. It is not intuitive but it is the industry standard way of doing it.

There has to be a big difference between trackpad usage and activating a mouse button action otherwise it is hard to tell the difference for the sensors. This is why the trackpad requires a good active push.

I should add an FYI, multitouch would solve a lot of problems but the support just isn't in the distributions for it. Maybe next Ubuntu release, we can work on a design update to match.