I find touchpad gestures to be a mess on both X11 and Wayland. This is one of the main reasons I don't use Linux on my laptop. Gestures aren't recognized reliably or frequently they just stop working at all. Plus there isn't consistent support for gestures across applications which although not a X11 or Wayland issue is still irritating. Everytime there is a new round of major distro releases I try them. Everytime I go back to Windows because of the gestures issue and poor battery life. The battery life being the main issue. I'll probably not try anymore because neither seems to get better.
I don't know what DE you're using, but on Gnome multitouch support worked out of the box the moment I logged in with Wayland enabled. Pinch to zoom worked in most apps (in my browser, in the picture viewer, and in the Maps app, which are the only places I ever bothered to look for it) and horizontal/vertical scrolling worked a lot smoother than on X11 across the board.
Your trackpad does need to be supported, though. Trackpads without Linux driver support will report to the kernel as if they're PS/2 mice with weird side effects, and those will never work well. If your trackpad has decent driver support (many Synaptic models, for example, though not all) then every single touch is being forwarded to the OS and gestures should work like they do on Windows.
Funnily enough, Windows battery life is a lot worse on my laptop than Linux battery life. I don't know what intern Lenovo had design the fan curves and power settings for this laptop, but I have the choice between "30fps desktop" and "sounds like a fan taking off" whenever I use Windows. I have my suspicions that Linux doesn't boost the CPU as much as Windows does, but honestly I don't need it to stick to its max boost all that often anyway.
My laptop is also a Thinkpad. My experience is the opposite of yours. A plain install of either Fedora or Ubuntu leaves me with about 40% of the battery life on Windows and a much busier fan. Tweaking gets me up to about 50% of the Windows battery.
The synaptics trackpad in my laptop has driver support. Gnome gestures are enabled at install but the trackpad multi-finger swipe gestures are detected erratically and then often stop working until I logout and back in. I assume this is a software issue since rebooting the device is not required. The linux version of my browser doesn't have any gesture support.
