Many want a pointing device on a keyboard. And I would prefer a trackpoint there too (trackball would be more precise but it is bigger and harder to put very near to your hand when it is at the home row ... and if I need to move my hand then I can just move it to my mouse). Putting a touchpad or trackball into the middle part of kinesis advantage does not look better to me than having a mouse/trackball just next to it. You need to move your hand about the same distance in both cases.
A small trackpoint would be nice, would cover the applications which are terrible to handle without a pointing device (or god forbid some cannot be used without a pointing device because it is not possible to even "alt-tab" to some control
).
CAD work: Precise positioning is important so a mouse looks a better option here.
Browsing: Well I use vimperator (a firefox plugin). It will not help with flash videos, it will not help with flash magic sites too but I'm trying to avoid the later ones as a plague anyway. Not considering flash, browsing with vimperator is comfortable and mouse free.
Window management: It can be mouse free with better window managers like xmonad or fluxbox (if you care to define a lot of stuff in apps and keys files). I'm using fluxbox with a lot of stuff in apps/keys files.
Editors: I'm not sure whetere even exist some which cannot be comfortably used without a mouse. I use mostly vim.
Why would anything bigger than a trackpoint be good on a keyboard directly?
I'm asking since I'm considering building a keyboard (I'm not committed yet
) and it does not look like considering anything other than a trackpoint there makes sense at all. And I'm not even sure whether a trackpoint is worth the effort.