I have had both the short right shift and the half-height arrow keys on different laptops, and the half-height arrow keys are by FAR preferable for me. Much less mistyping that way. Granted, I don't do much gaming on a laptop (although I doubt I'd use the arrow keys that much for that anyways, probably ASDW).

But I totally agree that the people putting keyboards together don't seem to actually spend much thought and definitely don't user test it with representative users, including keyboard-centric users like coders.