It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that a high proportion of people prefer physical slide-out keyboards to touchscreens, however, they also prefer nice, slim, lightweight, "sexy" phones, over bulky ones, and adding a physical, slide-out keyboard will make a phone bulky. The two are, quite simply, mutually exclusive.

For the younger generation, the aesthetics and degree of cool associated with a particular phone are massively important, and as a significant phone buying demographic, who've grown up with touchscreens, they are understandably very influential when it comes to designing phones.

Battery longevity is also a major concern for most people, and even if you could come up with a very desirable phone which had a slide-out keyboard design, I'd be surprised if many would go for that over an identical phone which offered a much longer battery life due to being able to fit a larger battery in the same physical case, by removing the keyboard and sliding mechanism.

From a design point of view, modern phones have few if any moving parts, which has a whole host of benefits from increased reliability, to reduced manufacturing costs, and ultimately lower retail price.

A better question for Bennet to have posed would probably have been, "Would you rather have a physical keyboard, or make do with a touchscreen and have a slim, more reliable phone with much better battery life?"

...this should get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_to_HDL

Find a suitable converter, then grab a free (or evaluation) version of an FPGA design tool, for example one of these (I only suggest these over the many other, probably equally as good alternatives, as I've used them myself):

http://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/ise-design-suite/index.htm

And with a bit of work you should be able to produce output that will essentially be your code implemented in programmable logic, and the tools will tell you the number of gates/cells required.

What I would say, is that you'll have a much easier ride if your algorithm is in C rather than C++.

Despite saying that you have no experience with this sort of thing, defining logic in something like VHDL is basically programming. Sure, you'll need to develop a fair understanding of the hardware, but with the libraries of pre-built components available from the numerous companies who produce programmable hardware like FPGAs and CPLDs, you may find you could do a lot more than you think yourself.