I never got why, if they really want the touch bar, they don't do both. F-keys and touch bar. I kinda would have welcomed this because the "fn" key is a horrible presence on any laptop keyboard anyway and I'd happily would have seen them delegate screen brightness and audio to the touch bar as a separate input.
Getting away from Fn entirely is tough -- it's still useful as a way of simulating keys like PgUp/PgDn/Home/End (Fn+arrows) and forward delete (Fn+Backspace).
Why laptop makers deleted those keys from the keyboard I'll never understand. With just an extra column of keys to the right of Enter, you get delete, page up, page down, home, and end. All very useful keys, right at your fingertips. Panasonic does it right on their rugged laptops, and some other manufacturers still have those keys on some business models, but most have done away with them.
I mean, look at the Dell XPS 15 keyboard. All that space on both sides of the keyboard, and yet they make us chord to do something as simple as Page Down.
My guess is that Apple is using the idiot bar as a trial balloon for abolishing physical keyboards altogether in favor of a touch interface (perhaps one with reconfigurable raised bumps for keys).
