Have you ever done any note taking on a touch screen? So far it proofed for me too painful most of the time.

My experience with the good old Apple Newton was the best ever. But only with the right signing alphabet. Still slow and the device was certainly underpowered. Hand writing recognition didn't work well.

The Palm III was usable with the gestures as well. My current Treo is a nice toy. For one hand usage of the phone I prefer the touch screen, but if I have two free hands, the keyboard is much faster, especially for alphanumeric entries. But ore than a list of keywords, I don't want to type on it.

Apple iPhone? I love the conversations with my friends that end in a dead iPhone user, because they touched the mute button with their cheek :-). The new touch phones with tactile feedback like the MacBoock TouchScreens seem to be an improvement at first play.

My current Gateway CX210X lasted about one week as a tablet PC. O.K., my hand writing is bad, but even entering text character by character did fail on the Windows software trying to guess the word after three characters (changing what was already correctly recognized, very frustrating) and un-usability of any correction algorithm. I should have spent my extra money on a Thinkpad or MacBook instead.

Note taking on a Netbook? It will simply fail because of the small screen, there is a reason why you use a letter size paper, instead of smaller size paper, for more than structured data like appointments or addresses. Why would that be different, on a device where the resolution is much less then a pen on paper?

Never the less for phone use and fast scrolling through (phone, contact, bookmark, ...) lists and pages, the iPhone showed that a touch interface is quite usable. The pan and zoom motiosn are very intuitive as well.

The main problem I see remaining with touch screens is that a touch screen gets dirty fast, which restricts it readability and just makes it more strenuous to read from it.

There is a lot of (false) assuming in these numbers.

A desk, office, furniture can be shared between workers, if done intelligently, such as you work MO, Tu, your "counterpart" works Th, Fr and you both work We from home.

Part time workers that work less than the typical 40h work week can be more focused and productive, so a 40% reduction in time might be less than 40% in productivity. Not everybody is good at that, but especially in knowledge worker jobs, you don't only solve issues in the office nor do you spend all minutes in the office with relevant work. But if the culture is right (good information flow independent of the water cooler gossip model), results oriented rather than time oriented, team work (where people seek help and help freely those that need it at the current state of project work), then part time work does not make the difference. Also, if your work times fit the rest of your live, you are more motivated and less distracted by home life issues (No worry who picks up the children, if you make the post office in time, the package gets signed for, the repair man comes, etc.)

I'd think that a business with an across the board overhead of 300% for its employees is one you want to leave immediately (they either pay you too little or are going bankrupt pretty soon. The 2x factor is about the upper limit I'd think. Especially in IT where you typically don't have extremely low wages.