It's a little misleading to call it "the exact same place as any other keyboard".
Here's[0] is my previous MBP. Pressing anywhere on the escape key will trigger a keypress. You don't have to be perfectly centred on it, and even having a finger half-off the left side will work.
Does that work for the non-visible bit of the touchbar?
And how do you know when you've actually pressed it, if the app doesn't immediately indicate it, and you're not looking down at the "button"?
> And how do you know when you've actually pressed it
Usually when I press a key I expect the application behavior to noticeably indicate that I've pressed something, regardless of what key I'm pressing. When do you press escape and not get actual behavior change, whether that change is to back out of a vim mode or to dismiss a dialog box?
Various tty applications will wait a short time after an escape to see if it was part of a esc-<key> meta combination.
In emacs esc-esc-esc is something I use relatively often.
It gets even worse over slow ssh to somewhere remote, when visual state updates could take up to several seconds.
On other keyboards I'd assume the tactile click of the key was a press, and could chain up extra inputs. Now I much more often have to pause to check I did in fact trigger the esc at the right point.
The other annoyance is the lack of touch force means even a slight overshoot on the number keys or ¬ will probably also trigger an escape, so I have to keep that it mind. It's much harder to do with a physical key because it takes more than brushing it with a fingertip when using the finger pad to press the targeted key.
Better haptics might make the touchbar a bit less obnoxious (and Better-Touch-Tool can already trigger the trackpad 'click' when a button is touched, but isn't ideal)
If Apple can implement 'force touch' on the trackpad, I suspect it could be possible on the bar as well, so it needs to be "pressed" rather than just "touched".
Here's[0] is my previous MBP. Pressing anywhere on the escape key will trigger a keypress. You don't have to be perfectly centred on it, and even having a finger half-off the left side will work.
Does that work for the non-visible bit of the touchbar?
And how do you know when you've actually pressed it, if the app doesn't immediately indicate it, and you're not looking down at the "button"?
[0] https://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/img/27By8ZzhyWJoIxipAsZsz3W0bj8...