It could have worked so much better as a display above the function keys. An extra long-and-thin screen that showed stuff and happened to be touch enabled. App

It could have worked so much better as a display above the function keys. An extra long-and-thin screen that showed stuff and happened to be touch enabled. App specific stuff, window-manager customisable stuff, all kinds of things. This would have given app developers an opportunity to do stuff with it that you can't do on a PC. Developers could have liked it instead of feeling mightily pissed off and betrayed by the company they had given so much money to over the years.