I find these Lenovo chicklet keyboards very pleasant. I have t420s which has it and R40 with old style keyboard. Tried to write on R40 recently and was surprised that it's not that big difference. I don't use F keys much so their layout doesn't bother me.
I have been there too. Then I installed cyanogenmod on my Nexus S. It's like night and day. Can't recommend enough. In the future I'm going after phones compatible with it.
The last tip on naming windows after remote hosts is nice! Now it'd be nice if we could run similar to ssh's LocalCommand on exit too. Turned out that I'm not the first to ask this: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/40899/ssh-localcomma...
With workaround too.
The downside is that if go like ssh A then ssh B, display doesn't update. But I don't this too often anyway.
I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why it didn't work for me. Then why I couldn't even do the usual echo -e ... to change my gnome-terminal's title. Turns out I already had a PROMPT_COMMAND set to echo the last command into the title which was overwriting my changes.