It feels somewhat sad to see them take away the physical keyboard. I find myself regularly using the keyboard on my current Kindle to annotate books as I read them. Even if it is more efficient to have an on-screen keyboard, physical keyboards symbolically imply that one could potentially be an active critic and participant rather than only a passive consumer of media. For the same reason I have always preferred computer to console video games, and I have never completely warmed up to the iPad even though I own one. Then again, my physical paper books always seemed to become filled with sticky notes and (erasable, penciled-in) annotations, too.
See I'm totally the opposite. I don't ever annotate books and losing the keyboard just meant more screen space for me. But if I did use it a lot it would be really obnoxious, their on-screen keyboard is pretty laggy and bad.