I should add that today I found out how much mouse pads can really effect your mouse. For years I have used a large razer pad. Sometimes my mouse would skip around like it was today and I always with this mouse had bad z-axes problems. I then saw on teamliquid a thread where someone said that my mouse worked better on white surfaces. So I put a piece of printer paper under the mouse and it instantly worked. I then put it back on the mouse pad and it started working a lot better. I still had some issues with tracking and when picking up the mouse and so I tested again with the paper and had 0 issues. So as a solution I taped the paper over my mouse pad. In addition to lower friction it now tracks perfectly with no z-axes problems! I plan to use this setup for a long time and see how it goes.

Perhaps for laser mice this is actually the best surface. Note though that I have high quality printer paper not the crap that starts to degrade and change color after a few months/year, this may impact how effective this method is.