Killing caps lock makes perfect sense, especially if it's still around as a shift-lock. Putting Home and End there is not the craziest thing I've seen done with it. (I personally remap it to a larger logo key, and use that with my window manager, but the X1 Carbon actually has a decent-size logo key to use for that.)
However, the soft function key row is crazy. It completely breaks touch-typing; if I wanted that, I'd use a tablet. Likewise, putting Delete to the right of backspace makes backspace a smaller target to hit, and it's a very frequently used key. Moving the `~ key is the kind of thing done by folks who think "Oh, nobody ever uses that", and who don't understand that keys used by 5% of typists are still critically important. (Both for people who need to type "jalapeño" and people who need to type ~/Downloads/foo .)
More importantly, there's no tradeoff here: this makes it worse for the loyal ThinkPad users, but doesn't actually make it proportionally better for others. And even if it did, that kind of consumer-targeted optimization is for consumer laptops like IdeaPad, not business laptops like ThinkPad.
However, the soft function key row is crazy. It completely breaks touch-typing; if I wanted that, I'd use a tablet. Likewise, putting Delete to the right of backspace makes backspace a smaller target to hit, and it's a very frequently used key. Moving the `~ key is the kind of thing done by folks who think "Oh, nobody ever uses that", and who don't understand that keys used by 5% of typists are still critically important. (Both for people who need to type "jalapeño" and people who need to type ~/Downloads/foo .)
More importantly, there's no tradeoff here: this makes it worse for the loyal ThinkPad users, but doesn't actually make it proportionally better for others. And even if it did, that kind of consumer-targeted optimization is for consumer laptops like IdeaPad, not business laptops like ThinkPad.