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I don't think they'll get rid of the physical (or at least in the case of the iPhone 7 kind-of-physical) button. It's part of their design language. If they do it would have to be a prominent, always on part of the UI.
That is of course unless they completely redesign the phone.
The only real question is how does the innate property of humans, greed, come into this. Surely this machine would need some interested corporation to construct it. Whatever company will, in essence be defunct by design and only exist in the short-term no?
EDIT:
I guess other questions emerge, why won't such a power be wielded for capitalism, it seems pretty easy to create a false-scarcity market if only corporations owned such a machine.
Again, this is a post-scarcity scenario so I guess the moment that any one person not happy with keeping the status quo got their hands on one it would all be over.
I guess there are XF86 standards and stuff for the keyboard but I still find it hard to think that it will behave exactly like the original.
Further, I would like to see more info on if the LCD gets working with the RPi because it seems like a great project.
Still, good luck with how the conversion works in the end!