[abhiv]

For me, the hard part about typing on a virtual keyboard is not hitting the keys, which are big enough on an iPad. It's switching to the non-standard keys like - or _, typing numbers, or even typing capital letters. Each of these requires one or more presses on a mode switch key, which changes all or most of the keys displayed, and then selecting the key to enter. Even for capital letters, you can't just press down Shift and then the key as you could on a normal keyboard. (You could rely on autocorrect if you need the capitalization at the start of a sentence, of course.)

Entering something like _ is especially poor because it requires two keypresses to get the keyboard into the right mode. So entering even a small bit of code on an iPad is painful if you use underscores in variable names.

Quite apart from the tactile feedback, I think mode switching is very disruptive to getting into the flow of typing -- "where did all my keys go?"