Try using Maya or Cinema 4D with just a trackpad and you'll realize how well Blender works with a trackpad. ;)
With Blender, it's not only a matter of learning the key combos, but it even has on-screen controls by default so you can at least use that. Maya used to have something similar, but they pretty much got rid of it. It's possible to configure Maya to make it easier to use with a trackpad, but the configuration for doing so is horribly obtuse and messes with mouse usage.
One major change is that it now defaults to select with left click, which should help things.
There's also an official Pie Menus add-on that lets you fit more controls in a smaller laptop keyboard. Numpad is the normal way to switch between view directions, but having them in a radial menu keeps it reasonably usable.
Lack of middle-mouse drag could be awkward and I don't know the solution off the top of my head, but I imagine there's something. You need to have both pan and zoom, I'd guess one is via two-finger scrolling and the other adds a modifier key?
Pie menus are actually build into Blender now, but there's also a great Pie Menu Editor add-on that lets you easily build you own pie menus and other user interface widgets without coding in Python! Which is very important for making efficient custom workflows.
Alias (and now Autodesk) has been abusing the patent system and spreading FUD about marking/pie/radial menus being patented for decades, which inhibited 3dsmax and Blender from supporting them for many years. But now Blender has excellent support for pie menus, and they're not encumbered by patents.
Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”:
>The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades
>Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).
>As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:
>"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."
I admit I am a bit of a masochist in that area but I am almost exclusively using blender on my laptop for many years and once you get used to it and have setup your keys correctly, it works
It's not the trackpad that gets me, it's the reliance on having a number pad that catches me out. Ok, it's not a reliance per se because you can control the view with the on-screen UI, but it's far less immediate that way.
There’s a setting for that: Edit → Preferences → Input → Emulate Numpad (‘Main 1 to 0 keys act as the numpad ones’). I don’t use Blender often, but I always enable this setting on the rare occasions when I use it on a laptop.
The last time I tried Blender - which admittedly is a while - it was practically unusable with a trackpad. Has this changed?