Years from now, will we look back at the iPhone and touch-enabled Windows 7 and blame them for the thin film of muck covering our screens and the thick layer of skin on our fingertips? Yesterday it was the latest iPhone, and today Hewlett-Packard announced a $1,299 all-in-one touchscreen home PC.

Look, I know Bill Gates has a vision for touch and speech navigation, and I’ve already admitted that touch is pretty compelling on a mobile phone, but when it comes to the PC, who over the age of five wants to touch the screen? Check out the photo of the little girl gliding her little digits across the new desktop PC. Touch is a cool idea for phones and other devices that aren’t on display or have large screens, but as a UI for a PC, I tend to think we still need something standing between us and the monitor.

That being said, touch is only going to become more prevalent. HP said last year’s TouchSmart PCs were so successful that they helped goose slowing desktop sales. HP uses the touchscreen capabilities in Windows Vista and also has written its own software, which includes writing notes in a calendar, accessing weather and the ability to flip through photos quickly. It’s more than navigation; it’s like an electronic message board for the family. However, third-party applications that take further advantage of touch are still few and far between. An HP spokeswoman didn’t give any additional information, but said the company is open to working with third-party developers of touch applications and that more details will follow.

The hope is that once touch becomes enabled in more devices, programs that take advantage of it will emerge. Everything from fun apps such as putting together an animated jigsaw puzzle to mimicking the turning of a page when scrolling through a web site could be fun. Right now there’s little to make it valuable beyond device-specific applications such as web browsing on the iPhone or photo flipping on the HP PC.

Touch could help create a simple UI for controlling a connected home through one computer, managing everything from lighting to HVAC. And that is most likely where touch will become important. Not for multipurpose PCs, but for more utilitarian tasks such as a family calendar embedded into a refrigerator where a keyboard might not be practical, or a home security system that’s integrated with heating and cooling and managed in one place. Touch allows for a less complicated software interface that might actually encourage you to program your thermostat.

The building blocks are already in place, with everything from higher-end sensors to enable truly transparent screens for less to the manufacturing of large-scale displays dropping in price. HP didn’t disclose their touchscreen hardware providers, but Synaptics and Cypress Semiconductor have products that can be used to build touchscreens.

Cheaper hardware moves touch where it belongs, inside appliances or in specialty objects such as the Surface table, rather than as an interface on a device you use for work and sometimes as a TV. Touch might enable advanced computing in places where it’s sorely needed and provide added simplicity much like it did on the iPhone. Just keep it it off my desktop, please.

Like the rotary dial, the keyboard’s role as a technological interface will soon come to an end as more information — especially visual information such as photos and videos — is stored on computers. And Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates hopes to help put the nail in the keyboard’s coffin, according to his presentation at the 12th Annual CEO Summit. In his keynote Gates focused heavily on natural user interfaces that combine touch, pens and speech to navigate computers and phones and that he expects to be available within the next decade. The keyboard, he made clear, is on notice.

He also briefly prophesied the formation of mega data centers built by “Microsoft and others” for cloud computing, but stayed mostly on the topic of Microsoft’s Sharepoint product and new forms of navigation. As part of the changing user interface he showed off an “intelligent whiteboard” from the R&D labs, which is essentially a Surface table standing up.

The demo unit, which had cameras located inside to track Gates’ hand movements, took a few tries before it noticed Gates. That’s never a great sign, but once it worked, the navigation was similar to what one would do on an iPhone writ large. It was less of a whiteboard than a giant, touch-controlled monitor. I can’t see myself dropping my keyboard for this, ever.

But with Microsoft pushing it, I will likely get the chance to try it. The computing giant may not be behind the sexiest Web 2.0 technologies or originating great user interfaces such as tabbed browsing, but it is very good at taking those technology successes, integrating them, and pushing them into a broad market over time.

It’s kind of like the Banana Republic of tech firms, taking different pieces of cool and edgy clothing (technologies), and assembling them into watered-down, business- and consumer-friendly outfits (products). Not everyone wants to wear Banana clothes, much like not everyone wants to use Windows, and Microsoft doesn’t always succeed, but so far Gates’ visions still count for something.

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