I think the touch bar is gimmicky, but I have to give Apple credit for bucking the trend of hiding UI and making functionality more rather than less visible to users. The trend in the mobile OSs has been to hide more and more functions being hamburger menus (Android), toolbars that only pop up when you tap them (Apple Maps), cryptic flat icons, etc. It's totally undiscoverable. This is the opposite: context-sensitive commands that show up and let the user know what he or she can do.

EDIT: This is how I feel about the "ESC" key thing as an Emacs user: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/59dp9u/apple_f....