The only input scheme that would be an enhancement to mouse/trackpad and keyboard is something akin to Leap Motion: https://leapmotion.com/
My second experience is with the Asus eeePad Transformer. It's great to randomly touch the screen when using a mouse would take a few seconds extra but in the long run you'd end up using the keyboard/mouse subconsciously since your arm starts hurting.
This isn't an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard with no mouse pointer support.
The Surface keyboards even have a trackpad and they've released keyboards and mice that take gestures.
http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/windowsexperience/archive...
"It describes untrained movements, not movements that are executed after months or years of practice"
That was exactly my intuition looking at those graphs. There's no way I'm going to be as fast reaching an icon in the upper right corner of the screen after heaving clicked start as I am reaching the top item in the start menu, after some training.
Furthermore, if you don't consider a trained state, this model seems simplistic to me. If you account for the ability to actually find an entry, top items in the list should be faster to click than middle ones - and I doubt a 2D grid is going to be as fast to find something on, until the training effect kicks in.
But you are right, as far as I remember the search results take over the screen and appear from top to bottom. But I fear you cannot really cater for people who click a button, then start typing and then click again – all of which would be done on the keyboard instead of constantly switching.
Or maybe they need it for gathering thoughts. The time required to switch input devices may come close to the time required to formulate in one's head what is it actually what one is looking for. But that is pretty much speculation ;-)
From the Jargon File:
"Gorilla Arm: The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_arm#.22Gorilla_arm.22