Apple said “emphatically” that it did not believe in fixed keypads for phones, since the touch screen provided more flexibility for alternative keypads and for various App Store offerings, and that it is portable across geographies and languages, providing significant scale economics.

There is something Apple is not getting, which is that having a physical keyboard is not just another design choice like making a bezel brushed or polished aluminum.  Barring the thumb keyboard from iPhones cuts out whole usage scenarios from the iPhone product vision.

The evidence is in plain sight.  Today, heavy texters think twice about going with the iPhone.  Those with stubby fingers are annoyed at having to type on-screen.  Blackberry crack addicts give up on the iPhone and return to Blackberries.

You can prove to yourself using the hallway usability test I conducted with a friend.  On your mark, get set, transcribe two sentences from a newspaper simultaneously, one of you with a Blackberry and the other with an iPhone.  Even experienced iPhone typers must double-check the work, override the iPhone’s auto-correct feature as necessary, and make corrections.  Experienced thumb typists on the Blackberry never have to look back beyond the last letter or two.  For an on-screen keyboard, the iPhone’s is excellent, but it’s significantly worse than a real-life, tactile keyboard.  No onscreen keyboard has yet to outperform the best thumb keyboard.

Most existing iPhone users won’t consciously miss the on-screen keyboard.  They just won’t be typing as much as they would were the device to do it well.  (Here, as fan boi of both Apple and the iPhone, I speak from personal experience.)

An Apple ban on thumb keyboards matters because it confers a massive strategic freebie to Apple’s competitors.  The others, like the Palm Pre can trumpet their legitimate superiority at sending texts, emails and blog posts.  (It was sad to see Blackberry buy into the Reality Distortion Field and stumble with its keyboard-less Storm.  A Blackberry without a keyboard is like a lollipop without a stick.  The thumb keyboard and it was an advantage, not a liability.)
There is a chance Apple has something up their sleeve.  Part of Apple’s design modus operandi is to try and think beyond the current generation of a technology, and implement that.  They could, for example, conclude that the thumb keyboard is inelegant and below them and been done, and that the underlying need — for efficient text entry — could be served better (and with more patented Apple PR pizzazz) by, say, voice-to-text.  Instead of texting your message, just dictate it and send it.

This is not unheard of: there exist today of human-assisted services for phones that will transcribe your utterances to text quickly and pretty accurately.  The voice-recognition approach has great promise for some scenarios, but is not without the usual downsides of voice recognition.  Responsiveness and immediacy suffer.  Dictated text demands proof-reading for accuracy and correction when there are errors.  And whereas texting your message is discreet, speaking it out loud is as conspicuous.

Another “out” for Apple is to make a great physical keyboard as a separate object that snaps onto the iPhone.  ”Haha, see?  We didn’t desecrate our beautiful device with a ‘fixed keyboard’.  It’s removable!”  (This do-it-without-doing-it solution would be analogous to Apple finally providing the highly demanded left-mouse button on the mighty mouse by not providing it: instead of a second button, it’s a separate touch-sensitive zone.)

Apple could, of course, be lying about banning the keyboard.  They have been known to misdirect in the past.  Let’s hope so.  As the  Palm Pre demonstrates, a slide-out keyboard and a touch UI can coexist beautifully.

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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.