I'd much rather have a device with lots of hardware controls
and a touchscreen, so that I can control the device without looking at it, or even taking it out of my pocket.
That said, the bottom touch bar was an absolutely terrible idea; I don't know how that made it through dogfood testing. Closed vs. open aside, what makes Apple unique is that they would have scrapped such a design and started over. We can only guess how many design iterations it took to result in the iPad.
