I think I see the value there. it'd be kind of hard to fit all those Chinese characters (5000?) onto a soft keyboard. come to think of it, I don't know what they do in China for "old fashioned" computer keyboard either.
It's around 6,500 for simplified Chinese characters, which is mostly used in mainland China, and it's actually around 50,000 for traditional Chinese, although they would never actually use that many... LOL
A Chinese mechanical typewriter, really was a clumsy and slow piece of equipment. ... no keyboard!
It's more like a typesetting, where you pick and place the individual types.
It's much easier with recent technology, because of Hanyu Pinyin romanization, e.g. you type "beijing", and you get “北京”.
Handwriting recognition for Chinese (hanzi) should be fairly easy and error free, and many people do use it their phones, because the strokes have to be written in a certain order, direction and style, and everyone is taught that at school and college.