It's a mystery to me why they didn't do this, at least on the 15" Macbook. Instead they made the already-plenty-big-enough touchpad even larger. A secondary screen / input control above the full keyboard would be awesome. It'd be a great way to get notifications (tests passed, build finished, sports scores, whatever...) or have ad-hoc controls.

RE: Lack of haptic feedback - There's an app for that - https://www.haptictouchbar.com/ It's not great (that the feedback is in the touchpad and not the touchbar is disconcerting), but it's better than no feedback.