First of all, there's no seventh row on the keyboard. Second, the Trackpoint buttons are gone. Third, the Thinklight has been replaced with a backlit keyboard, which is egregious as the Thinklight allowed one to illuminate documents or other materials as well as the keyboard.
It's just like any other laptop now. And when you're used to 1440x900 (I'm on a MacBook Air) 160 horizontal pixels is really worthless and screws up the proportions. What ThinkPad users want, and have wanted for ages is a 16:10 display, excellent engineering, and the TrackPoint front and center.
While from a business standpoint, this is perfectly viable and a smart move on IBM's part, in the long-term, seeing how Lenovo has ruined the Think brand, I would be wary of spinning off any more operations to Lenovo.
They just don't have clear product focus, but in this world, I guess shareholders rule. Even if those shareholders don't act in the best interest of the company.
This could have huge ramifications, but as usual it's Congress mucking things up.