Yup, that's a non-starter for me.

I didn't even notice at first. I was glad to see they all have 16:10 screens and sad to see low usability up/down arrow keys popularized by Apple (making it inverted-T shaped helps marginally even when small).

The other thing they got right (IMO) is not including a number pad on the 16" which seems common with larger screens and a discrete GPU.

Yep. Lenovo did this with the Thinkpad Carbon X1 and abandoned it veeeery early on. I liked the design philosophy of the XPS Plus last year, but I'd wager their capacitive function row is headed for the exit.

I’m surprised they included the Esc key in the touchpad at least.

That was the deal breaker for me on Apple keyboards. I could deal with the F-keys being a touchscreen but I use Esc way too much for muscle memory to not work. In practice I remapped Caps Lock to Esc, but it was still a pain not having it in the right place.

I know I wasn’t the only one with this opinion. I thought touchbar Esc was a long acknowledged usability don’t at this point. Even Apple changed that one up pretty quickly.

I'm not sure if Dell ever officially stated, but it seems like their touch bar exists mainly to free up space for bigger heatsinks without making the machine thicker or moving the keyboard down, not for the sake of usability. The lack of concern for usability is apparent in several other design choices.