Being able to replace the keyboard is especially wonderful because laptops are usually "region-locked". I know people who use relatively unpopular layouts relative to where they live, and it makes it harder to buy and much harder to sell their Macs.
[1] Shift+7 == /, AltGr+¨ == ~. These two in particular are tedious as a Linux user.
Comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt1DL1fO6Zs
Note that weird abomination of a backslash key around the enter key on the US keyboard.
There's no way to just map the US keyboard to the UK one.
But I’ve ended up using a split keyboard where every key is 1u. All language layouts map to the physical layout in basically the same way.
Mac UK is shit.
It's awful.
Some of the other changes aren’t great, I agree.
Shift+3 does not give you #.
Despite that, the Qwerty keycaps remain useful for me, because my keyboards are not programmable, so the key mapping is done by the operating system. When I have to unlock the computer with a password, after booting, the keyboard still works as Qwerty and the keycaps help me in entering the password, because nowadays I touch-type only on Dvorak, while on Qwerty I must return to hunt-and-peck, as there are many years since I stopped using Qwerty.
So only because of this password entering, I prefer to not have blank keycaps, even if I ignore them in normal usage.
I will always loath the Mac UK keyboard layout. Wildly different than ISO and ANSI for absolutely no benefit.
If you get the key caps, they're trivially swapped.
I use Dvorak, and I've swapped keys for every generation of keyboard over the last 10 years. Once swapped, the layout can be set system wide.
I've swapped ~579 keys (6 MacBook keyboards, and one magic keyboard) with exactly one broken plastic bit from the very first key tried, before looking up the youtube video on how to do it. Damaging the metal retaining frame is impossible when removing or installing them appropriately, so the technique you used was very very wrong. They're easily and trivially popped off and on, if done right. Great care is not needed, with the whole processes taking me around ~10 minutes.