James,
Funny you brought up typing. Mom made me take "touch typing" back in high school. I was the only guy in the class and it was terribly embarrassing but that F-D-S-A J-K-L-; home position stayed with me my entire life and like you, I can type and talk at the same time. I wonder how many people know why there are little raised bumps on the F and J keys!
David
For me, typing was just part of the curriculum in the 7th grade (1962). I didn't mind it much because that's where the girls were. It was fun, but didn't use it much until college (1967). And then, it was only on a ASR-33 TTY machine. You can get into a nice rhythm with those old teletype machines. It wasn't until I got into the working world, that I had better keyboards. Not necessarily good, but better.
Even though I have been manipulating a keyboard for most of my life, I still use a pencil and paper when working CW. I took my 20 WPM Morse test with a guy that opted to use a keyboard. It was a disaster, and that was his 3rd try.
Yea, those raided bumps. For me, those are the first thing to wear out and disappear on my keyboards. The lettering is next. The lettering on my current daily driver is pretty good, but F-D-S-A are fading fast. It's a good thing my fingers know where the keys are. Lighted keyboard are nice, but they are the worst for wearing out the key caps. After a while, instead of a nice glow from the characters, you get a glaring hole. I had to disable the key lighting.
My company use to cater to the whims of the new engineers. They were always sure that they could increase their productivity with some new odd style keyboard. I never saw any of these odd style keyboards last longer than about 30 days. Then they were back to the old style keyboard.