OK, so out of curiosity, I tried. Touch-typing on a regular keyboard whether working off an oral transcript (though I definitely cannot keep up, verbatim), or a written text, I'm in the 70 WPM range with some typos (say 5 typos, about 140 words, 2 minutes). So certainly not perfect, but pretty good, and definitely functional for note-taking and such. I then tried touch-typing on the virtual keyboard on my N7 and: ha! Of course it is smaller than the conventional iPad, but I had so many typos it wasn't even funny, to the point of not being able to tell what word I had written (it was so inaccurate I did not even bother timing myself). Plus I would do things like hit the "minimize" button when I meant to hit the space bar. So, definitely a no go for me. OTOH I did notice the system's auto-fill and it's possible that were I dedicated to learning to use the thing to create content in that manner, I could get to where through auto-fill and typing I could work up to a reasonable speed. Also, the N7 has a microphone voice-to-text function that actually when I tried it briefly, it worked a lot better than I expected it to (based on my experience with Google voice transcription, which is good, no, great for a laugh...). But since I do often like to use the thing to take notes in meetings and/or to e.g. reply to short emails while stuck watching a powerpoint (i.e. I cannot talk into it without disturbing others), I haven't made much use of that functionality.
Overall the inexpensive add-on keyboard is definitely worthwhile to/for me, but certainly I can see that depending on how one uses it, that might vary. And definitely overall they remain better for consumption than creation, but still, they are moving to where creation is at least possible.
Oh ... the N7 virtual keyboard does appear at least to have an apostrophe on the main alphabet keyboard. So there's that! OTOH neither it nor the add-on keyboard I bought have the tilde ~, which can be downright frustrating for some functions (when I needed one, I had to go to a website, copy and paste it).