TI announced their new CapTIvate MSP430 controllers today. TI has been implementing capacitive touch via their CapTouch software library. having moved cap touch to hardware will definitely help touch performance and battery life.
To evaluate CapTIvate, TI is selling a MCU Development Kit for $99.00. It consists of the MSP430FR2633 microcontroller board, a programmer/debugger board with EnergyTrace™ technology to measure energy consumption, and sensor boards for evaluating self-capacitance, mutual capacitance, gesture and proximity sensing