but other than that the new MacBook pros are better in every department.
No they aren't. I don't have a single USB-C peripheral. The fact that I need to buy and use the USB-C to USB-A adapter makes this laptop strictly worse. A dongle within a dongle. We must go deeper.
I do use my DSLR and this means copying photos from the SD card. I have other things with SD cards too. At the moment I can just insert these into my Air and it works fine. Honestly I don't want to buy another adapter for the new Macbook. If I were to buy this Macbook Pro, I'd just give up on this functionality altogether and use only my desktop machine. I can't be bothered with more dongles. This is strictly worse than the previous laptops.
The trackpad in my opinion is impractically large. Larger is not always better. It's like doubling the size of the door handles on your car. Unnecessary, impractical and rather weird. I don't want to rest my hands on the trackpad when typing. And as we can see, this is causing all sorts of problems as the palm rejection stuff has bad interactions with drag and drop and gestures.
A hardware Esc button is just strictly better than a capacitive, drawn one. So it's not better in this regard. Actually I think the touchbar is completely unnecessary.
The keyboard is worse. I tried the keyboard of the 12" Macbook and it's a disaster. It's almost universally hated, and the Macbook Pro one is slightly better than the worst laptop keyboard.
The integrated graphics on the new 15" isn't better than the old one. It's a lot worse in fact.
Not having MagSafe is worse. I really liked MagSafe and it saved my laptop from falls several times.
The price is also far worse.
So it's not better in every department. It's better in some departments (SSD, thinness, display, fingerprint sensor). Overall this machine is a heavy compromise, and its primary purchase reason is that it runs OSX, and people
have no choice.
Imagine that you would be free to run OSX on other laptops, like the XPS. Nobody in the right mind would even look at this Macbook Pro, at the price Apple is selling it. That says it all.