Comment 2 for bug 795349

This is definitely a known issue with the current batch of Dell latptops out there. The Latitude and Precision laptops all use ALPS touchpads, which have rather poor native Linux support. You'll get very basic functionality out of these touchpads, but that is about it.

The touchpads present themselves to the operating system either as a standard PS/2 mouse or a Microsoft PS/2 Intellimouse. Touchpad disable, multitouch, etc. are currently non-existent. These systems were enabled with a pre-loaded image for 10.10, and some userspace fixes were applied that helped get the touchpad in a more usable state. Some of these fixes are incorporated into 11.04 (such as side scrolling). As far as toggling the touchpad on and off, you can download the tar file from here:

http://dell.to/q0pceq

..inside the 'debs/main' folder is a toggle-touchpad debian package that will implement a userspace workaround to toggle the touchpad using the Fn+F5 hotkey (for 11.04 there's no need to install any of the other packages as those fixes are already part of the 11.04 distribution). The toggle-touchpad workaround is far from perfect, but, it will provide you with a mechanism to turn the touchpad on and off.

It is not exactly what you seek, but, I hope it at least helps out a bit. As far as the gnome-control-center itself is concerned, this is a valid feature request. Hopefully ALPS touchpad linux support will be improving in the near future.