Interesting. I see it exactly the opposite way. Physical keyboards are neatly out of the way yet always ready. A couple of cases in hand: CTRL+<letter> combinations in the browser, a key combination to take a screenshot, pressing a letter to apply an instant filter in a file manager or a contacts list... in all these cases you have a full, unobscured view of the screen.

Virtual keyboards, on the other hand, pop up when they please so you are at a mercy of the OS designer. When they do pop up, they take up a sizeable portion of the screen, hiding most of the context. I have yet to see a virtual keyboard taking less than a half of the screen. On my Jolla it is more like 2/3.