Apple might have made some missteps lately, but they're not stupid. The point of the "magic" toolbar is to help desktop users finally leverage the useful thing

Apple might have made some missteps lately, but they're not stupid. The point of the "magic" toolbar is to help desktop users finally leverage the useful things you can do with contextually aware keys/controls, which is more in line with how humans approach things, and a massively under-recognized part of the reason that iPads are so much easier for non-computer people to use than PCs or desktops. See that 'cancel' button in the screenshot? That will be the escape key, under basically all circumstances that you would want an escape key. Here it says "cancel" which is more descriptive and is exactly in line with the language used on all the buttons and dialogues the user will see on the screen. "Cancel" is what it actually does. "Esc" isn't. Especially if the user is currently in a terminal, or VIM, I would expect the key to show the 'Esc' label and continue as normal. Under bootcamp, or under older macOS applications that don't attempt to interact with the Magic Toolbar API, I would also expect that area to show the 'Esc' key. I'm looking down while typing this on a Microsoft keyboard and I see 5 giant "My favourites" buttons and some weird "star" button, and a calculator button, all of which I have never used, and which sit above the mouldering function row which again is used fairly infrequently by me, and basically never by my family members. That is not how to design an interface.