IMO that was a foolhardy decision; Macs are (were?) very popular amongst designers and programmers, why limit the accessibility of the keyboard? Do you realize how many strokes on the Esc key a VIM-using dev does per day?
It's as if Apple doesn't care about the professional audience anymore.
They should've offered a "touch bar" and "normal bar" variants for their laptops IMO.
And they do have a normal bar variant of the 13", although that might go away when prices come down.
Lastly, your argument sounds similar to me to the people who vowed they would never give up their physical phone keyboards. I don't think they made much impact on Apple's iPhone sales.
Seems your top priority is preserving what you are comfortable with. My gut feeling is potential for better interfaces no one has even thought of yet for Touch Bar is immense.
I am not "vowing" anything. There are changes that do make sense and others who don't -- and that's subjective, of course. For me the real physical feedback when typing is irreplaceable.
And don't give me that talk that I am a grumpy old fart. Until we have computers able to react on voice like the Star Trek computers do, full physical keyboards are not going anywhere. It's about convenience and speed of the interaction, not about trends.
For the record, just played with the TouchBar in the Apple Store, and think it's super cool. Also love the humongous track pad, and believe USB-C support will explode in the near future.
So I'm curious to see sales numbers for Surface vs. the new MacBook Pros. Might be more "switchers" to Surface, but also a big increase in MacBook Pro sales overall.