I used the command pm-hibernate to see if my notebook would successfully resume after hibernating. Upon resume it went through the BIOS screen, I had to reselect Ubuntu from the Grub menu, but then it went back into the desktop right were I left off, it seemed fine except the touchpad didn't work. I rebooted, and the touchpad still didn't work. x-input --list did not list a touchpad, only "Virtual core pointer" with "Virtual core XTEST pointer" listed under that. A mouse plugged into the USB port worked just fine. After another reboot or two, I went into recovery mode and selected the repair broken packages option, however it would not initialize the wireless adapter to get a network connection so it would not repair any packages. I explicitly told it to set up the network connection by selecting the option "Use Network Connection", which also failed to do anything, so so then I did what any normal person would do, I shut my system down and went to sleep thinking about that one printer scene from Office Space...
When I woke up this morning, I booted into Recovery Mode again, couldn't really think of anything to do so I told it to start Ubuntu normally, and lo and behold my touchpad is back. I rebooted to make sure it would work booting from Grub and not just from the Recovery Console and it still works. Now xinput --list shows SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad plain as day, and everything is working fine, multitouch, gestures, the whole shebang.
So what's the deal? Does anybody have a clue what happened? Is there a way I can figure out what happened, or a specific approach I can take in the future should the problem reoccur?
