Yes, I've of course seen the demonstration. Very slow typing indeed.
The main killer is that you don't "feel" where on the keyboard you are, so you have to look. But since your thumbs are on the keyboard, you don't really _see_ that much. a "real" keyboard, be it oh so small, gives you _some_ information through the shape of its keys. Believe me: I've tried a *lot* of input methods on small devices in the past decades, and most of them are lacking. The eMate was good, but that had an almost normal sized keyboard, so that doesn't count. On a "normal" mobile phone like the Sony Ericsson W810i I'm currently using, I'm actually very fast, because T9 works very well for me. I'm also quite fast on the Nokia Communicator, which has an actual keyboard that's quite a bit bigger than a treo thumbboard.but onscreen keyboards have _no_ tactile feedback. It simply _isn't_ the best thing there can ever be. I understand that it's been done in favour of having the whole face be the screen - doesn't change that an on-screen keyboard is less than ideal. Try to find an exclamation mark -> you've got to switch to the numeric/symbol keyboard and then back again. Ugh... *If* they have multi-touch, they should have done a Shift-key for crying out loud.
I'm just saying: Only because Steve said so, it doesn't have to be the best thing ever. I'm _also_ saying that I'll buy one the minute I can. 
