I think keyboard innovation is a good thing

I agree to a certain extent. The example you posted is a good example of how to do this. Randomly getting rid of a key for no aparent reason and changing the layout a small bit is annoyning though. The new MS keyboards are close enough to the normal 104 key layout that I will probably make many mistakes switching back and forth between it and other keyboards. Where as the one pictured above is different enough that changing back and forth wouldn't cause me problems.