Yes, my Mac has a trackpad. I have not yet installed Lion on it, so I don’t have to deal with the scrolling direction issue yet.
But, yes, you can configure a *lot* more in KDE than you can in Mac OS X. The argument from the Mac partisan would be that there are some things you shouldn’t be able to change/configure, but I disagree.
First, I am not a Mac partisan, any more than you are a KDE partisan. That is an exaggeration on your part. Second, I think it is clear that I have been using Linux a lot longer than you have and have a lot more experience on that platform than you.
The argument on the Mac is not that somethings should not be configurable. The design of the graphical interface is based on what has been called the 90/10 rule. Most users spend 90% of their time using just 10% of the features of the graphical interface. So that 10% is easy to configure. The other 90% is configurable, but it's not obvious how to do it to most users. You will need to go to the command line. But I am a long-time Unix user. I spend a lot of time at the command line. How much time do you spend at the command line on your Linux box? From your responses I would say very little. You have not yet discovered the power of a Unix operating system.