Good to know. I would think this is a nice boost for Colemak. Qwerty is not the end of the world as some would make it out to be, but it has never been comfortable for me. Ever. Nor does it make any sense in a world after mechanical typewriters. Colemak was virtually an instant 'free pass' to type better and faster for me. Qwerty on the Kinesis does not make much sense, you'll see when you get the board. You make the effort to have a separated, matrix, keybowl so all the keys are easy to reach and very intuitive, then you scatter letters in an un-intuitive, un-ergo pattern. Colemak and Dvorak work very well on the Kinesis, I kind of regret not spending more time with Dvorak on the Kinesis, but at some point experimenting has to stop and actual life needs to take place :) An odd personal quirk with Dvorak: I like the vowels grouped together under the left home row...my head wrapped around that immediately. Maybe/maybe not physically, I didn't use it long enough so I don't know, but my mind absorbed it like a picture of a pretty girl :)

I am learning colemak on OSX Lion. After seeing that the Option/Alt key mappings were different, I download and installed the layout file found from a link in another thread here.  It appears to have the correct mappings and works perfectly well.  I even managed to leave it set to that layout mistakenly and walked away only to have my laptop lock me out.  :) Thankfully I had another machine handy to look up where all the characters for my password were!

This is probably a mystery to young people that haven't used typewriters.  A lot of people were trained on the typewriter or had at least used one.  Making the transition to an electronic typewriter that much easier, which would have been the precursor to the computer keyboard.  It could have been a good opportunity to swap the layout there and then, but there was still an overhead of having to produce different mechanical parts to do so.  Mass production probably dictated sticking with Qwerty.

Then I guess if you were trying to sell very expensive personal computers part of your sales audience might well have been typists - so they kept Qwerty alive.

Also typists wouldn't want to go through the pain of learning a new layout - as it's such an investment in time and effort building your speed in the first place.  My first contact with a keyboard was a mechanical and I was born in the 70s.  Electronic typewriters were a luxury item, made affordable in the late 80s.

I think that's why it would really suit new users including hunt and peckers as well as touch typists.  It makes memorising the layout that much easier (not that it actually takes long to learn a layout.)  If you'd asked me to draw the keyboard and layout a few years back, I'd have certainly had gaps - and I used one daily.  It's odd what you miss or can't be bothered to learn.  If you have in mind the idea that common letters are in 'better' places, then the more optimized layouts follow some rhyme and reason.  You at least have an intuition as to where characters would go:  Q wouldn't be on the home row for instance.