Apples and oranges. There is something refreshing about someone who is willing to throw away a fundamental precept of tablet PCs (they have a stylus) because it sucks. I think every engineering team needs someone with some level of "wait why are we doing things this way?" (see P.G.'s essay on onions).

In a way Ritchie was the exact opposite. A lot of the answers to questions of the form "why does C do things this way?" are "because BCPL did them that way." Which is a perfectly good attitude for an engineer as well ("don't fix what isn't broken") but also a more typical one.