What happens with that "absolute position relative to some arbitrary 0,0 picked by the mouse" when the user picks the mouse up off the table/pad/etc. and repositions it (i.e., they hit the edge of the pad and now "re-center" to continue moving left (or right) on screen). The mouse loses its 0,0 point reference as soon as it is picked up.
It could send a "reset 0,0" packet of some form in this case, but now reception of that packet becomes critical to continuing to properly communicate motion to the attached computer.
> It could send a "reset 0,0" packet of some form in this case, but now reception of that packet becomes critical to continuing to properly communicate motion to the attached computer.
And those "how I would have designed a wireless mouse protocol" guys are back at the square one.
That's not how mouse input works though, right? If I move my mouse cursor to 10,10, and then pick up the mouse and set it down somewhere else, it's still at coordinates 10,10. You don't need the mouse's physical absolute position, but just the cursor position (which is the sum of all the relative movements)