Touchscreen PCs always felt awkward when they were underpinned by Windows Vista, but now that Windows 7 has arrived, we've begun to see these devices come into their own.
First out of the blocks was the Sony VAIO VPC-L118FG/B, which wowed us with one of the best screens we'd ever seen, and now Acer has unveiled its own premium touchscreen model: the Aspire Z5610.
While Sony's touchscreen effort was a graduate of the minimalist school of design, the Acer is a little more domineering. Two chrome struts support the weight of the 23in screen, and liberally scattered around the Aspire's glossy bulk are strips of deep-maroon plastic.
That doesn't look as bad as it could, though, and although the Z5610 is unlikely to appeal to everyone, we'd have no reservations about letting it take centre stage in our living room.
The display takes pride of place and boasts a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 - higher than the 1920 x 1080 offered by the Sony. It uses the same optical touchscreen technology as the Sony, and this means the screen control feels highly responsive and accurate.
It offers two-finger multitouch control, which allows you to zoom, scroll and rotate images in applications that support it. And the panel itself is bright, boasting realistic colours with no sign of backlight bleed.
It may not be able to match the quality of the double-backlit Sony, but it isn't far off and is perfectly capable of doing justice to any media you care to throw at it.
Beyond the scrolling and panning support built into Windows 7, the bulk of the Z5610's touchscreen-specific features are wrapped up in Acer's TouchPortal interface, which hides Windows 7's familiar desktop beneath a wood-effect tabletop scattered with icons.
Featured applications include Windows' own Touch Pack tools - Lagoon, Globe and Collage - and Acer has bolstered this collection with some of its own applications.
These include an image-sharing tool for Facebook and Flickr, a handful of games, plus basic note-taking and drawing tools, the likes of which we've seen before on HP's TouchSmart systems.
Acer has crammed the Z5610 with a surprisingly good specification too. The Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 processor returned a superb 1.47 in our application-based benchmarks - marginally quicker than the Sony, which scored 1.44 - and the plentiful 4GB of RAM is complemented by a massive 1TB hard disk. Elsewhere, you get a hybrid DVB-T/analogue TV tuner, 802.11n wireless, and a decent pair of speakers.
If there's one area where this Acer disappoints it's in the graphics department, with a weedy ATI Radeon HD 4570 offering little in the way of gaming ability - although the Sony is no better in this respect.
It returned a score of just 16fps in our medium-quality Crysis benchmark, which rules out running modern gaming titles at high detail settings. Perhaps more surprisingly, it also struggled to run some of the touchscreen software, with demanding tools such as Microsoft Surface Globe often struggling to keep up a smooth frame rate.
Another mild irritation, especially given the superb screen, is the lack of Blu-ray, which the more expensive Sony does have. The peripherals are also of a lower quality, with a mouse that lacks special features and a keyboard that both feels lightweight and is plagued with a poor typing action.
Despite these irritations, the Acer Z5610 offers enough quality elsewhere to offer a creditable alternative to the A-Listed Sony. Its touchscreen is responsive, it boasts a decent range of features, and it looks great to boot. And it more than comes into its own when you take into account the price.
At $1999, it's almost $1000 cheaper than the Sony, a differential that makes up for its few weaknesses. If you can't afford to splash out on the extravagant VAIO, the Aspire Z5610 should be next on your list.