My hunch was that TouchBar wasn't about the keyboard, it was about the screen. They were looking to do away with the laptop screen entirely, and the keyboard w

My hunch was that TouchBar wasn't about the keyboard, it was about the screen. They were looking to do away with the laptop screen entirely, and the keyboard would be the computer. You would always need to plug your laptop into an external display. Many people mostly just plug their laptop into external monitors anyway. The benefit is you could cut the cost of the laptop drastically and make it more robust. But to do that, you would still need some display on the keyboard for various scenarios (mostly to resolve any connection issues with the display), hence the TouchBar. But just a theory.