Thanks for logging the issue however this is actually expected behavior.

The pointer events spec changed the model for touch to be implicit capture mainly for performance reasons. See this issue for the details:
https://github.com/w3c/pointerevents/issues/8

Chrome currently ships this model, Edge will ship it in a new release coming. PEP; I'm not sure why it hasn't been updated yet.

Nonetheless you can release the implicit pointer capture by listening to the gotpointercapture event: See http://jsbin.com/qeqiyox/edit?html,css,js,output

Also if you call releasePointerCapture on pointerdown handler you would not notice event a thing. In other words releasing pointer on pointer down handler would cause the behavior to be exactly like no implicit capture at all without any gotpointercapture or lostpointercapture dispatched.

thank you. calling releasePointerCapture on pointerdown restored the expected behavior for me. I needed this for drag and drop because using event.target is faster than calling elementFromPoint on every pointermove.

How have you determined that it is slower? Technically from our point of view it should be roughly the same cost. 

I did not do performance testing in chrome 55. But back in 2015 we noticed that drag and drop was considerabely slow on chrome with touch (we are using PEP and elementFromPoint to check if we are on the correct target) so we used event.target instead of elementFromPoint and the problem was fixed.