I’ve gotta say, after watching a friend thumb-type at fairly high speed on a touchscreen soft-keyboard – assisted and occasionally resisted by the dreaded proximity-aware autocorrect – my own insistence that I want a physical keyboard has dropped significantly.
The combination of autocorrect and activate-on-release (a touchscreen UI trick I first saw in IBM research some decades ago, though I’m not sure whether it existed before then) does seem to have been what was needed to make up for the complete lack of tactile feedback.
Mostly.
