The author completely failed to mention discoverability. Which is a huge part of usability because it allows _new_ people to sit down at your applications and gradually work up their expertise until they are keyboard wizards (or whatever).

So, no, just having a bunch of magic unlabeled buttons and saying "use the keyboard" isn't good usability. The part that kills me, is that a lot of these applications don't even really have shortcut key guides. So, you don't even know the magic key sequence for something until you discover it by accident.

Worse, are the crappy programs that break global key shortcuts by using them for their own purposes.. AKA firefox seems to manage this on a pretty regular basis. Want to switch tabs? ctrl-tab, oh wait, it doesn't work anymore, cross fingers and hope someone notices and fixes it (which they did).