...for whatever reason it also gave me a gui...
Odds are the extensions were already installed, but without the system being able to "find" the tce directory, it could not
load any of the installed extensions as it didn't see any. This is especially common when the storage device isn't "online" when the boot process begins, thus the USB WAIT boot command helps with this even if it's not specifically a USB device.
...so now i'm trying to support my touchpad...
Without a make/model of the laptop not even G00gle can find you an answer
Try installing both
usbutils and
pci-utils and see what it returns as to the hardware in your machine. (PCI command is lspci, USB would then be lsusb)
You may need to install a firmware extension that's specific to certain USB, Serial, PCI, etc. devices in order to open doors to things such as scrolling, assuming drivers for the device are not proprietary.
That said, if you were able to determine and install driver support, you may find that the original "light weight" X server might do just fine without all of the "Xcess."