What interests me is how much of the ui / os will one be able to control with the keyboard ? I read somewhere that someone at the hands on party after the keynote had a brief play and said that text entry obviously worked with the keyboard (doh), and I believe they said you could tab to the next field. But what about keyboard control to navigate the home screen, and in app navigation ?
Quite interested in this, as at times I'll be using the iPad with the voiceover screen reader - and my s.o. will be using it exclusively with it. A laptop or desktop mac can be controlled via the keyboard when using voiceover - easier to do if you're blind than a mouse pointer of course. Keyboard navigation gives you a sequence of options for menus and such like which can remain constant, instead of a mouse pointer which needs you to know exactly where on the screen you are wanting to select, for which you usually need to be able to see it.
Some apps are accessible on the iphone 3gs with voiceover (all the stock Apple ones are, and often third party apps are too), and although on the iphone you use your finger to roll over the items and they are announced (then you double tap to confirm the selection most of the time), it strikes me as if with a keyboard attached to the iPad that switching from keyboard use to "finger on the screen" use might be a bit tiresome after a while. Whether you can see and are not using voiceover, or not.
If I've got my hands on the keyboard of a non iphone OS mac, that's how I navigate. It would seem the natural thing to do under the circumstances (for me). But there again, so far I've never known anything else, so ... maybe text entry only with a keyboard then poking the screen to navigate after a while will become the most natural thing in the world.
As with all of the things we don't yet know about the iPad, I guess we'll wait and see.
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