Much like Apple Microsoft appears to be moving in the direction of unifying their mobile and desktop offerings with the mobile portion getting the best of the union. It's been interesting to see some industry pundits predict the death of the keyboard and mouse because of this. I don't like the chances of the mouse but I'm pretty sure the keyboard is going to be with us for awhile longer though eliminating it would be one way to finally kill the intentionally inefficient QWERTY key layout.
One of the key things to consider in all these predictions is the fact that computing devices have two general classes of use, consumption and production. Mobile devices are optimized for consumption of information while desktops and laptops are optimized for production. Physical keyboards are very much optional in the case consumption but as of today they are very important on the production side. Of course not everyone is a producer. Even in today's world only a small percentage of us have a desire to self publish and on the professional side the picture has been increasingly bleak for several years now. Sending text messages is a more widely used form of written communication but virtual keyboards work fine for the kinds of short messages that are best suited for that means of communication.
So, will touch screens replace keyboards on the information production side of things? The answer to that one is simple, NO! The touch screen is a mouse replacement, not a keyboard replacement. You can accuse me of being old fashioned but I'm pretty firm in that belief. Technology companies are going to have to look elsewhere if they want to get rid of the keyboard. Voice recognition software has gotten very good and offers one potential avenue but how feasible is that in the cubicle farms that so many people work in? More credible would be some sort of Kinect like capability. I'm not sure that a three D imaginary keyboard would be any easier to type on than the virtual ones we see on touch screens today but I'm at least willing to acknowledge it is possible until I'm proven wrong.
Palm's Graffiti was the best solution to this problem that I've seen but even it had limitations. I got fairly good at writing the various short hand characters that made up Graffiti but I was never anywhere near as fast with it as I am at a traditional keyboard.
So in short, in my opinion the rumored death of the keyboard is greatly over stating what is actually going to happen. I agree that how we interact with computers is going to change radically over the next ten years and keyboards are going to play a smaller role but short of some sort of direct neural hook up I don't see them ever going away.
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