It always surprises me when someone predicts that keyboards will go away. People love typing. Or I do love typing. No way I am going to talk to my phone, especially if someone else can hear it (which is always basically).
And I was like, "But that's not a complete replacement, right? What about the times when you don't want to broadcast what you're writing to the entire room?"
And then there was a big reveal that AI has mastered lip-reading, so even then, people would just put their lips up to the camera and mouth out what they wanted to write.
With that said, as the owner of tyrannyofthemouse.com, I agree with the importance of the keyboard as a UI device.
I think the more surprising thing is that people don't use voice to access deeply nested features, like adding items to calendars etc which would otherwise take a lot of fiddly app navigation.
I think the main reason we don't have that is because Apple's Siri is so useless that it has singlehandedly held back this entire flow, and there's no way for anyone else to get a foothold in smartphone market.
When you have a nice mic or headset and multiple monitors and your own private space, it's totally the next step to just begin working with the computer with voice. Voice has not been a staple feature of people's workflow, but I think all that is about to change (Voice as an interface, not as a communication tool, that's been around since 1876.
But-- that means "not pivotal any more, just hugely important."
Wow, I've always felt the keyboard is the pinnacle of input devices. Everything else feels like a toy in comparison.
That aside, keyboard is an excellent input device for humans specifically because it is very much designed around the strengths of our biology - those dextrous fingers.