@mr_creosote Touchscreens are a compromise to make small computers more viable; a physical keyboard at the size of phones doesn't really have an advantage and is terrible to use too--even worse, it can't adapt so you'd need an onscreen keyboard anyway (e.g. emoji or for non-latin character languages).

So you might as well do a full on-screen keyboard so you can use the screen the rest of the time when no keyboard is required. (And you can always connect a real keyboard if you want to.)