Any keyboard is reprogrammable to your heart's content (assuming you're using a decent operating system). When typing a LaTeX document, I reprogram my keyboard so that the backslash is in place of the semi-colon, the numbers and shift-numbers are swapped, and a few other optimisations. I did this because typing LaTeX with an ordinary keyboard was causing me some pain in my fingers and doing this adjustment fixed it.
Something interesting to do is to count occurrences of characters in your documents. For example, in my latest paper, the top four characters are:
13001 t
12385 e
11291 \
11135 o
The total number of numbers used was 766. So making the numbers harder to type doesn't mean too much extra stretching, and putting the backslash somewhere easy to reach saves a lot of effort.
(Added in edit): A little while after this question was asked, the site http://tex.stackexchance.com came into being. A very similar question was asked there and I gave a rather more detailed answer there than I did here. Here's a direct link to my answer there.
(Thanks to Peter for reminding me of this and suggesting I link the two.)
