Not to me. To me it reflects the idea that for some tasks, regardless of the quality of the GUI design, you just plain need a physical keyboard.

For example, if you really need to use the full display for the application, and can't give up a portion of it for a virtual keyboard or something similar, then that's what you need. SSH and/or VNC are great examples of that.

And, even without that, until real haptics and morphable touch screens come into existence (where "morphable" means "the screen deforms to reflect the area of a button, and deforms again as you push it, to give you ergonomic feel for the keys and ergonomic feedback as you press a key), even the best touch screen virtual keyboard will be less optimal, for some/many users, than a physical keyboard.

There ARE tasks for which a keyboard is just the most optimal input method. Even with the best handwriting recognition (even the Newton had a keyboard product), even with the best voice recognition software, there are still going to be cases where a keyboard will be desired. So, you're also going to find that no matter how good your GUI is, there are going to be tasks that users are just going to say "Hey, I need a physical keyboard for this". Devices without physical keyboard support only serve to cut you off from those tasks.

Plus, the statement reminds me of something NeXT said back in the late 1980's. "If you have to open a terminal window, then we've failed in our user interface design". Sounds nice, and like they've got good solid priorities on GUI design ... but it was incredibly naive. The fact is, it's a unix workstation, and there are always going to be people using it that just want to use _unix_. It's still true on today's implementation of the NeXT environment (Mac OS X). And no matter how good Maemo's GUI is, it will likely always be true on Maemo.

The point isn't "do you need a real keyboard _ever_", the point is do you ever use a keyboard for applications that conceptually shouldn't need to be keyboard driven. That's the case where you have to wonder whether or not the user interface has been properly thought out. But for those apps that really ARE keyboard oriented, a keyboard IS what they should use, and that's not a failure of the user interface designer.