Today's mice no longer use the serial port or a bus card to connect, preferring to connect either through a USB port or directly to the motherboard. Windows has a standard mouse driver program inbuilt to drive a mouse, but that generic driver is replaced by whatever driver comes with the mouse currently installed. Trackballs are very similar to mice, except they roll inside a socket instead of freely on a mouse pad. Trackballs are even more susceptible to dirt and gunk than a mouse, which can go down within hours in a dirty environment. Trackpoints and touch pads are other versions of pointing devices similar to trackballs, and are even less popular than the trackball.
Mice are by far the preferred pointing device currently available.
But IBM was snooty and, besides ceding a large chunk of its market to the Commodore 64 as a result, set PC gaming back a generation. Apparently joysticks, like color graphics cards and sound cards, didn't fit with IBM's button-down world paradigm. God knows it didn't take companies like Creative Labs, Hercules, Matrox, and Roland much time to leap into the void, but that's the reason why '80s IBM users had to spend so much time cursing over compatible sound and graphics cards. The most common type of gaming device is the joystick, in all its many varieties. Newer offerings are purely digital, eschewing the mechanics of the old joystick for faster, more precise digital throughput.