"Touch is intuitive, but there's so much more that we could do with it, and not enough applications have been written to take advantage of touch," he added. "Typing is a well-accepted input system, and keyboards are here to stay. We seem to become more and more attached to them."

3. Handwriting recognition software is not up to speed.

"If you write with a page of chicken scrawl, it ain't going to work," Fiering noted.

The software that can be used to turn handwriting into text is not fully accurate, meaning that if your handwriting is sloppy, the text recognition will be poor, Kay added.

Microsoft's Vista operating system is supposed to help with autocompletion of handwritten words but will not help with poor handwriting, meaning that handwriting recognition will not be a key driver of the tablet PC technology, Fiering said. Doctors and salespeople who take notes with tablet PCs are basically interested in saving their handwritten notes for their own use later on, not converting them to text, she explained.