I was making systems with touch screen interfaces from Elographics in 1989. The POS terminal business has used them for over 20 years. The only thing unique here is the n-finger gesture vs single point gesture.
The abstract is more narrow than that. It includes a limitation where one number of fingers causes one type of display modification, and a different number of fingers causes a different screen modification. A device that has only ONE n-finger gesture seems to not infringe.
I have a number of laptops with touch PAD technology (Synaptics) that recognizes/differentiates one, two and three fingertip events.