In a recent post, we noted that Snow Leopard would bring multitouch gestures to older MacBooks. However, as TUAW points out, this statement needs to be clarified. While MacBooks have supported two finger scrolling since the days of yore, which SHOULD be considered multi touch, most people have pointed this out to be a software hack, as opposed to true hardware multi-touch.

Apple, however, changed the actual trackpads in early 2008, with the introduction of the MacBook Air (remember the Stevenote with all the fancy three finger gestures? Yeah, that one), and all of the aluminum MacBook [Pro]s after that point were manufactured with the new trackpad as well. What Snow Leopard presumably does is tweak the configuration of the trackpad using Synaptics (you have to do this manually in Linux, so we know you can achieve this) so that it will support the new four finger gestures as well. Apple should have saved us all the trouble early on, and given us the ability to map our own gestures as we would keyboard shortcuts, but alas, no such luck.

While this is still great for owners of early 2008 MacBook Pros, for example, it may not be as much of an early birthday present as you thought before, so buy that cake anyways.