Why do you keep bringing up one person's ~10 minute experience with the VKB and refer to it as gospel? That's one person, whose fingers may be skinnier or fatter than yours who used the phone for ~10 minutes. And unless that person spent 10 minutes typing out the worlds longest text message, I'm not really sure their time spent with the VKB could really be considered that meaningful. (no disrespect to whoever posted about the VKB, though)

Every phone that has a keyboard, virtual or hardware, WILL have a learning curve (obviously, some will get it faster than other). I test on the iphone EVERY DAY for work. When I first started using it, I hated it because my fingers are larger. I also had to adjust going from an E71 to an N900. The point is, VKB's are not an exact science and every person's response to them will be different.