The iPad is cool — but where’s the Dvorak keyboard?

I’m impressed by the iPad. It has just about everything I want, and most of what I expected. (Wednesday morning, I wrote a post on my blog Kirkville with my predictions; with the iPad now announced, I see that I got most of it right). I’m planning to buy the device as soon as it’s released in the next few months.

But the iPad is missing something that’s very important to me—and to a lot of other people: Dvorak keyboard support.

According to Apple’s tech specs for the iPad, the device offers the following keyboard layouts:

Keyboard support for English (US) English (UK), French (France, Canada), German, Japanese (QWERTY), Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese (Handwriting and Pinyin), Russian

That’s all well and good, though it might be a bit limited for the number of countries where the device will be sold. But where’s Dvorak? While I can get by on an iPhone typing with my thumbs on a QWERTY keyboard, there’s no way I can adapt to a “full-sized” QWERTY keyboard like the one one the iPad.

Come on, Apple! This isn’t hard to do. I’m guessing that it’s just a simple keyboard layout file that defines the positions of the letters. There is a hack for adding a Dvorak keyboard to the iPhone, which may work on the iPad, but I don’t want to have to mess with things like that. (Not to mention, the hack requires jailbreaking the iPhone.) There are enough people who want to use the Dvorak keyboard on the iPhone that you really should add it.

So please, Apple, can I haz a Dvorak keyboard on my iPad? Pretty please?