The dwindling popularity of keyboard phones is just a vicious circle.
Not-so-big share, iphone copycat-ism, and slimming trend caused makers to stop doing good qwerties, which drove people away, which causes marketroids to declare qwerties undesireable.
The one who'll break the circle is in for profits. I'm not saying there's a huge market for hwkb but there is one, let's say arbitrarily 5%. Now that nobody does a cool highend keyboard phone, with the slimmest trend reaching it's peak, and screen sizes that allow spacious keyboards, if google does an unlocked, keyboared phone with latest pure android it's gonna be a hit.

And as keyboard is addictive, next time market share will grow. I speculate that if a proper qwerty is introduced the market share after a year or so of all hwkb phones can easily be 10%. In my book it's an unexploited market.

It's happened before and it can happen again. When people looked at me using a touchscreen pre-iphone they said they could never use something like this. Hwkb is not even in that case. Most people are either indifferent or never used a good hwkb, and some are even impressed by good qwerties like E7/N950

Note that I'm not saying next nexus is going to have qwerty, It'll be another black slab.