For god's sake, touchscreens should work out of the box

[Matteo Sisti Sette]

I took a 6-year old computer with a builtin touchscreen (not a notebook) 
that had Ubuntu 7.10 installed on it, and it had the touchscreen 
working, though I guess it had needed some work to set it up correctly.

I installed 12.04 LTS on it, wiping out the old installation. The 
touchscreen didn't work out of the box. It definitely should. It's 
absurd that on a machine that has a touchscreen for which support has 
been available for 6 years, the touchscreen is not enabled by default 
and working just out of the box.

Additionally, I followed literally step-by-step the guide at 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touchscreen to configure the touch screen (it is 
a shame that one has to do all that stuff manually in the first place), 
and I ended up with a machine that won't boot.