Yeah, I certainly have seen similar keycaps before. No idea what's so novel about those particular caps that they need a patent.

Plenty of prior art if you mean "round old-typewriter-style keycaps on a computer keyboard":

http://steampunkworkshop.com/keyboard-shtml/

A company also sells these (although they're much more expensive than the one in the article):

http://www.datamancer.net/keyboards/keyboards.htm

It might not be as bad as it appears.

There's something called a design patent which IIUC prevents, e.g., Samsung from selling a tablet computer that looks too much like an iPad.