Games? What is wrong with asdw (except that it destroys these keys earlier)? Nothing (all FPS games, requiring speed, use these and there are keybinds near these keys as well), except when you dont have a hardware keyboard (N800, 770). The software keyboards in existence are all pretty shitty IMO but given the popularity of N800 I must be wrong on that one.

Pandora comes with 2 of these dpads (no clue why... must have some reason...), and Pandora is aimed for this purpose of gaming, so perhaps a device such as a Pandora is better suited for those who deeply care about games. Maybe I like the N810 hardware keyboard because previously I used mostly phones and Sharp Zaurus. Both an even worse keyboard...

Also, remember that scrolling currently sucks compared to other devices. If you take Fennec into account, you don't have to use the dpad there. You use your fingers to navigate through the application. The only reason you'd need your keyboard is to become Sir TypeALot. They do their best to limit your required keyboard usage to minimum.

[EDIT], I will give example: take the RSS Feed Applet. You either have it small and informative with lots of items (a lot information, stylus friendly, finger unfriendly), you have it with big buttons and you must scroll up and down using the buttons (far less informative, finger friendly, not optimized for stylus but works). Autoscroll is resource hog.

Now, imagine you can scroll down in this by using a gesture instead of the buttons. Imagine you point on an item and it will show you the summary (full screen, or overlapping area; given my attention span I say full screen ). Then you get 2 options: 'X' (close) or 'OK' (more information). While this does not make the application as informative as it standing, doing nothing, showing you the RSS items it does make it better while using it (IOW, outdoors). Indoors you can have your tablet standing doing nothing and being a monitor, sure. And, with some intelligent tagging, filtering, and feed browsing (this, given complexity, more for 'later' versions I suppose!) it could become a killer application.[/EDIT]