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Looks like it will be painful to get used to, but we said that about the QWERTY keyboard and look where we are today.

I don't even think so. It's just QWERTY without Y axis, after all. I guess that you'll be accustomed to it after a couple of minutes of typing.

What's hard is adapting to entirely different layouts such as Dvorak (which, by the way, could probably increase autocorrect accuracy greatly).

This is likely true for those of us who have already become accustomed to typing using QWERTY, but there are many who are just learning or have yet to learn to type, most notably children.

If at some point an input method that is faster and more efficient than QWERTY gains real traction and is taught or exposed to our youth, I'd expect a shift away from what's become convention.

This is by no means something that will just happen overnight, but I'd be a little saddened if in the last years of my life, QWERTY remains as the dominant method of text input. It's certainly a good solution, but no where near an optimal one.

The "gaining real traction" part is exactly the issue. Of course, we'd all love our governments to force everyone to learn Dvorak or something similar, but usually, no authority worries about our keyboard layouts, and people just use what others use.

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