> While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish.
It's there, plain and simple: keyboarding around switches off (or busy-waits) a part of our brain, while providing nice tactile and quantized visual (every character stop) stimuli in regular interval. It feels faster, because that's how our brain is wired to measure time.
On the other hand, mousing around doesn't provide any cool stimuli until you actually activate the target widget. It feels long-ish, because the brain has to constantly work on adjusting cursor trajectory and nothing serious happens till you actually activate the widget.
The later argument is the case of rarely used commands. Of course ^S or ^P is faster than hunting the `Save...' or `Print...' through modern long menus, but that's an exception; an action to be taken once every few minutes. Manipulating text tokens and blocks (that's what we do most often, right?) is inherently faster with mouse than with Vim-ish or EMACS-ish regexps. Same for browsing hyper-text documentation or 'net forums.
Tell me you can select and move around a word, line or block of code faster with regexps than with mouse, and I'll gladly do it faster with mouse. On the average, anyway, which is what matters in the longer run.