Please help with my XPS 15z Cypress Trackpad/Touchpad

Sorry, but I feel the need to vent a little first.  My old laptop was a Dell Inspiron E1705 that's about 7 years old now, and it was showing it's age.  The hinges weren't holding, and it takes some effort steady the screen at the desired angle.  It's heavy, and gets super hot (almost burn worthy) when sitting in one's lap.  It only has 1GB of RAM, and is running Windows XP.  Nevertheless, it served me well, and I loved that laptop. 

But it was time to get a new one so I bought a Dell XPS 15z.  I've had it for a week now, and have some minor complaints about it: lower resolution, inferior speakers, and a keyboard that feels weird and is missing some keys.  But I was willing to look past all that, as it does have amazing performance:  i5-2450M CPU @ 2.5GHz, 8GB RAM, 750GB 7200RPM hard drive, and is much lighter and easier to carry around.

However, the Cypress trackpad/touchpad is just plain awful and really ruins things.  Let me put my problems with it in list form (FYI, I have the latest Cypress Dell drivers installed, 2-finger, and multi-finger gestures turned off, and tap-to-click disabled-sorta):

• On my old laptop, with my right hand, I was able to use my middle finger to do vertical edge scrolling, while being able to click the left or right button with my index finder.  The vertical edge scrolling was perfectly responsive, and could "coast", making browsing the internet a breeze.  The Cypress touchpad on the other hand is huge, and the mouse buttons are narrow, making my right-handed scrolling-and-clicking technique impossible without gorilla-sized hands and a dislocated index finger. 
• The vertical scrolling is atrocious as sometimes it recognizes my attempt to scroll, sometimes it doesn't, and seems to randomly decide when it's going to work or not. 
• When it does scroll, it does so way too quickly, preventing me from slowly scrolling down a page while reading, instead choosing to jump a paragraph or two down or up, despite my setting it to scroll 1 line at a time. 
• There's also no "coasting" feature, forcing me to make multiple swipes at the pad to scroll down a page.
• Another major annoyance is that if I accidentally have 2 fingers making contact with the touchpad and click the left mouse button, guess what it does?  It performs a right-click...wtf is that?  The huge pad and narrow buttons make accidentally having 2 points of contact on the touchpad a frequent occurrence. To have a left-click perform a right-click seems like the most counter intuitive thing it could do.  Whoever made the decision about that behavior needs to be fired.
• The tap-to-click option returns after rebooting despite my turning it off.  I turned it off because again, it's hard not to accidentally make contact with the huge touchpad.  And if you're typing, it caused the cursor to jump around and screwed up what you were typing.

I thought I found a solution by uninstalling the Cypress touchpad drivers, and just using the default Windows 7 mouse driver.  The vertical scrolling was much improved (though still no coasting), and I could live with it.  However, I've found no way of disabling the tap-to-click feature despite googling for hours.  Anyone know how to do this?

I'm typing this message with my old laptop, and good God do I miss this one's Synaptic touchpad and driver.  I'm actually considering returning my new laptop as I just can't use it with that Cypress trackpad.

What do you other XPS 15z users do?  I'm sure plugging in a USB mouse helps, but it's not a valid "fix", as it's unrealistic to always use an external mouse.

I'm just beyond frustrated with it.