Is the whole escape key thing a joke that I'm not in on? Why don't you just use the part of the touchbar that is exactly the same as an escape key all the way down to saying "esc"? I don't get it man.
It's pretty much the same as the difference between a car where the air conditioner and radio knobs are a touch screen vs. being real knobs that you can safely adjust while driving.
I would still prefer a physical function row, but it’s not that big of a deal. And actually some of the controls on the touchbar are really nice, for example the volume and brightness controls for changing all your connected displays at once.
I suppose it's just a matter of personal preference and habit, though. Maybe some people have trouble aiming? I really thought I'd miss the tactile feedback (as has been the case with similar touch devices for me in the past), but in this case, I don't really notice it.
* Distance to caps is 1-key
* Distance to touch bar ESC is ~3-4 keys, which is quite a bit to travel for a pinky and for me even requires forearm movement. But this is the same, touch-bar or not, so I've been remapping since before the physical ESC disappeared anyway.
This is a bigger deal for me because I use vi mode on my terminal and so I hit ESC all the time in the terminal.
Also I use Dvorak, so 70% of my keystrokes are already on the home row, so moving off the home row for something so common as ESC is much more noticeable.
Lastly - who the hell uses caps lock anyway? For short words like ESC, holding shift has now become second nature. For longer things I often type it in lowercase, select in vim, then use `U` to convert to uppercase. For not-in-vim uppercase on the internet: I just don't shout. :P
Caps lock is superior to the original escape key location, though, IMO.