As an enthusiastic owner of all three iPad models, I've found that "wanting a keyboard" is a very good sign that whatever you're doing isn't a good fit for the iPad.

With that said, here's an iOS feature that'd be very easy to implement: application-level "passthrough" mode for physical keyboards. Not only would it allow for better "traditional" editors, the fact that iOS doesn't rely on the keyboard for OS-level navigation would make it a perfect vehicle for VNC and RDP clients with "transparent" keyboard support.

I could understand Apple prohibiting the use of such an API for accelerators "merely" to discourage half-assed ports of traditional WIMP apps, but why not allow the use of a physical keyboard as an "IT controller" just as they permit external controllers for games? It's simply unreasonable to insist that developers build a more "touch-based" interface to fundamentally non-touch-based remote systems, and nearly as unreasonable to expect professional programmers to adapt to a "touch-based" UI paradigm for _editing text_. The fact that the Cocoa text edit controls play well with Emacs-style key bindings is, for me at least, a HUGE advantage of OS X, one that'd be very hard to usefully duplicate in Windows.