During the demo, they showed an Esc key in the touch bar when using Terminal and a few other apps

Pretty much. I am struggling to understand the issue here.

Three points: The escape key is not where it is normally. The escape key is not present in all contextual operations (that is, you can open up a menu on the touchbar which causes the escape key to disappear in favor of a "close" button). There is no physical feedback that you've hit escape.

The only thing I can accept is the lack of feedback.

As long as the Escape keys exist when required, why worry about when they don't?

For me? Because I can't tell without looking at the keyboard whether it exists or not (and potentially whether it's been moved by some program's integration with the touchbar).

I've been touch typing for years now, and the idea that I have to look down at the keyboard to see if a key exists (a key that that has existed for the entirety of my computing history) is ludicrous.

I will admit, the lack of taptic feedback on the touch bar is surprising to me, given it's presence in the touchpad

But then how do you change the volume when using vim? Does vim need a special touchbar that basically completely emulates the old keys? That seems excessive.

Uh, I mean the touchbar has so many keys. Escape would be one of them and the touchbar could behave like old keys once there is Terminal.

I fail to see the issue here.

The volume controls remain on the right.

Did you watch the presentation? Or are you just pearl clutching to try and crap on something you don't like?

It's a perfectly fair point. The function keys provide 2 operations each, depending on whether you use the [fn] modifier, so does the ribbon duplicate this functionality or are we effectively left with half the functionality of the old keys?

Personally, I don't see how you can quickly modify the volume from the ribbon if the application you are using has repurposed that space for some other functionality it thinks you are more likely to want