When using my synaptics touchpad on Windows, the driver has the option of giving the cursor inertia (note, not just the scrolling).
I found it a lot less straining to use the touchpad with this feature enabled. You could 'fling' your finger in a direction and zoom across the screen quickly instead of 'treading through mud' to get there.
So is there any way of getting cursor inertia on Ubuntu 12.04?
synclient
. Synaptics manpages have the details.