Similar things were probably said about smartphones with touch screens being inferior to physical buttons.
After using my tablet as a second screen for production, photo editing, CADing, and coding, it's become woefully apparent that the mouse - a tiny singular cursor - is an inferior grandfather to an interface that _also_ supports multitouch, and the only thing holding tablets back is software. Obsidian is a good example of a mobile app that has parity with its desktop version in both maintaining its keyboard shortcuts but also enabling touch interactions closer to the affordances of physical notes.
Let's check in again in a few device generations.