In the tablet industry there is a lot of room for various designs and approaches to the idea of a tablet computer. Some makers have done slate-style tablets that feature nothing but a touchscreen and a rear back plate, other makers have released tablets that feature touchscreen's and slide-out QWERTY keyboards. There are a lot more tablets that don't feature a built-in keyboard than there are that do.
The majority of tablets feature no keyboard and a wide range of consumers are purchasing those models. With the tablets that feature built-in keyboards the type of consumer willing to pick-up such a tablet is much narrower. The people that require a tablet have a built-in keyboard want to do their best at emulating their laptop/netbook computer while still using a cutting-edge device like a tablet. targeting.
So far the tablets that have come with keyboards built-in haven't been that inspiring. Most of them have featured cramped keys and no wrist rest. The smaller keys make it hard to type if you have large hands and the lack of a wrist rest makes long-term typing pure torture since there is nothing there to support your wrists.
Is there a way of making a better tablet+keyboard combo? As tablets become bigger and bigger there are sure to be more people looking to jump from a laptop/netbook to a tablet for their mobile computing and those folks might want built-in keyboards.
I think there is no solution that doesn't drastically affect the overall mobility of the tablet. As I've seen so far the tablets that come with built-in keyboards weight significantly more and are also significantly thicker than their keyboard-less counterparts. And even with compromising the overall mobility of the tablet the built-in keyboards have been lackluster for the most part (due to the reasons mentioned above).
Keyboards are nice things to have, but having them physically tied to your tablet is less than ideal. A solution like Asustek Computer Inc.'s Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is what makes the most sense. Asustek managed to design a keyboard dock and tablet separately that can be docked together to transform the tablet into an Android notebook with a full qwerty keyboard with wrist rests.
