> But, a keyboard-based interface is still more efficient ...
This has been proven false any number of times. It's false when comparing mouse use against a modern keyboard with control and function keys, and it is certainly false for the limited keyboards for which vi/vim was designed, those keyboards that result in vi/vim not being able to exploit control characters.
Source: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
Quote: "We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster."
The above quote comes from a study performed a while ago and repeated ad infinitum since then.