Which was already the case at that time, with Blackberry, Palm and HTC dominating that market using Intel XScale.

Intel tried to corner that market by deviating from ARM with their custom MMX architecture. It worked with Windows PocketPC as a OS-supplier, but HW-vendors with their own OS didn't want to limit their supply-chain to a single CPU-platform.

But yes, their belief in x86 being superior surely clouded their judgement on XScale's future potential

And they would have been just as shitty as the Blackberry. Hell, even Google had to go back to the drawing board with their Android prototype because they still thought a physical keyboard on a phone was king....right until they caught a glimpse of the first iPhone.

i loved the blackberry keyboard and would take it anytimes over this fucking iphone keyboard. The iphone keyboard is a step backwards. people like haptic feedback.

tens of millions of consumers say otherwise

The middle of the bell curve, which dominates the market, has a need for drool-proof interfaces that many of the sort who frequent HN and similar interest communities do not.

Swipe typing > physical keyboard > digital keyboard.

There's still phones made these days with physical keyboards if you truly value the feature.