Don't think of humans in isolation. Think of them in combination with their technology.

Yes, but all those advances are only maintained due to external factors. Take away the technology or limit it in some way (think scarcer cheap energy), and all of a sudden we take several steps backwards.

doesn't have that totally useless numeric pad no one uses nowadays

I don't know about other /. users, but I find it much easier to enter long numbers using the keypad. My line of work requires working with a lot of financial data, and as such I need to do this on a regular basis.