The soft keys forced the home/end keys out, as well as the Escape key and the Delete key. Home/end landed on CapsLock, which was then relegated to a double-tap of the shift key. The double-tab feature was so sensitive that it could be activated just by typing normally, which suddenly would activate capslock.
To add to the confusion, the Escape key landed on the ~ key's location, which then had to be relocated to the right-hand windows key placement.
The delete key was jammed in by cutting the Backspace key in half and putting it there.
It took weeks of pure frustration and anger for me to even begin getting used to all this. The experience permanently turned me against soft touch bars on the function key row.
I get your point about switching keyboards can get confusing, as well as it looks kinda weird at first, which is definitely enough to make people complain.
Good points.
Unfortunately, both of these changes were not particularly popular. I think people only disliked the Home/End keys in place of Caps Lock because it was weird and different—I saw a lot of whining online, but nobody ever complained about not being able to use Caps Lock any more!
To some extent, I see where people are coming from: I regularly use at least two different external keyboards as well as my laptop keyboard, so it's hard to get used to a weird layout in just one place out of three. I'm an early adopter at heart and willing to power through the inconvenience for what I see as a better design but I also understand that it's too much bother for other people. (And, honestly, the upside isn't that big!)
On later generations, ThinkPad switched back to a more standard layout. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple wanted to avoid a similar reaction in changing the keyboard layout too much, especially since their touchbar was already a big enough change to stir up controversy.