This is one of the reasons I hung onto my Treo for so long. It was so much faster to do... well, basically anything that the device was capable of. With the physical keyboard, you actually didn't need to take the stylus out very often, either.

Calling Mark: (power on) (phone key) M-A (send) - hitting the phone key automatically brought up the dialer, which did double duty as contact search.

Adding a new event to the calendar: (power on) (calendar key) (enter) - and just start typing; you could navigate the fields with the up and down arrows.

Opening the calculator: (power on) (home key) C-A (enter) - the launcher was filterable with the keyboard.