I suspect it does not work well outside Apple world. And that's kind of the thing with "I want Apple hardware but with Linux software": Software is actually important in the user experience with the hardware.
I don't know about the magic trackpad specifically, but on my HP Elitebook I can use gestures. I'm running i3 and it doesn't support much out of the box, but I was able to configure stuff using libinput-gestures.