Thank you, now I know what's been (slightly) bothering me about many maemo UIs: some of the toolbar buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Take deleting a file in file manager as an example. First you have to select the file, then go to a different part of the screen and press a spatially unrelated button (the trashcan). Why isn't [delete] on the context menu, right by the affected file, so to speak? Isn't that non-direct, in a way? At the very least the static toolbar takes up precious screen real estate even when not needed.
Before someone complains that the context menu would get too complex, yes it would. Off the top of my head: Replace the textual context menu entries with symbols where established symbols exist and show those in a *circle* around the affected object to minimize stylus/finger travel time. For the more advanced options that require textual descriptions, put those in a third-layer menu (that pops up if you press down on an object even longer).

Can one test-drive these alternate input methods somewhere?

You're right of course. It's nice to get *some* reassurance that a hw keyboard isn't going to be an integral part of the platform.

Just be careful you don't overspecialize. Nokia's feature phones (used to, at least) suffer from this.