But "full colour multitouch interfaces" are awful compared to keyboard keys! Getting to switch back to my mouse + kb after using my phone is so fantastic.
This bar is all the bad stuff about a touchscreen (limited/no tactile feedback, reduced ability to rely on muscle memory) plus the bad stuff about keyboards (primarily that they are not where your eyes are naturally). There are a few tiny niche uses cases that will be nice, like video scrubbing, but 90% of the time it's just going to be functionality that is more difficult to use than it was previously.
I'm pretty sure I hate the current situation with F-Keys at least as much as you claim to hate multi-touch interfaces.
If you truly use F-Keys by touch (i.e. without looking) forcing the touch bar into F-Key mode should get you pretty close to what you had anyway.
The F-Keys don't have the little identifying lumps (on mine these are on F & J), so you simply have to know where they are by muscle memory. The only difference is you're tapping like a track-pad tap (as opposed to trackpad click).
On a proper IBM-M style keyboard layout, the F keys are in groups of four, with spaces between each group. This makes it trivial to touch-type them without looking.
It's really a very well laid out keyboard design. The worst thing about laptop keyboards is that they are all so non-standard, and every manufacturer does their own special-snowflake thing, so that it is almost impossible to touch-type on an unfamiliar machine.
This bar is all the bad stuff about a touchscreen (limited/no tactile feedback, reduced ability to rely on muscle memory) plus the bad stuff about keyboards (primarily that they are not where your eyes are naturally). There are a few tiny niche uses cases that will be nice, like video scrubbing, but 90% of the time it's just going to be functionality that is more difficult to use than it was previously.