For NIT designers to complain about poor style consistency, and apps with poor adherence to a given style, they need to have put in the work on putting that infrastructure into place (style guides, rich set of style implementations for app designers to both leverage and compete with, etc.). Where's the solid finger friendly email application? Modest may be better than what was there before, but it's still not something I'd hold up as an example of great finger/touch-screen design. Where's the solid finger friendly PIM suite? Where's the finger friendly web browser? For NIT designers to preach about "we should eliminate hard buttons from the design, for design purity", then they must first be an example of that design purity, not an example of the design problem. Lead from the front, and lead by example. And, even then, it's still going to come down to "there are times when the best/fastest information input will be typing". Or, because it's an _internet_ tablet, it's going to be using web pages and web apps that were also designed for desktops, and are thus either keyboard focused or have shortcuts that make input much faster with a keyboard. In those cases, not being able to use hard buttons becomes a limitation.