...and other languages depend on Roman 26-letter alphabets for input. They do not. Each language has developed its own keyboard
While they may have developed their own keyboards years ago, they no longer use those keyboards with characters on them because Chinese has over 10,000 character that would need to be represented and it was deemed slow and cumbersome. Instead they type using the "latin" keyboard in pinyin (which is the phonetic pronunciation of a written character utilizing only the 26 letters). A program then presents all possible characters related to that pronunciation from which they pick the appropriate one.
And while you are correct this is not ideal, I can type over 60WPM in Chinese and have friends that can type over 110WPM. What would be better, and what they indeed do have, is a tablet that recognizes character strokes which are then printed stdout.
As for creating OSes which no longer have the Latin foundation, you'd need to not only entirely rewrite them (because even RedFlag Linux and such have a Latin base) you'd need to rewrite the languages they're written in.
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Well of course Vista will ship with this supported already. Just like WinFS...er..
if they come up with a really catchy name.
...creating its own iTunes competitor, which we've dubbed 'Google Tunes'
yep, I can see it taking off
While they may have developed their own keyboards years ago, they no longer use those keyboards with characters on them because Chinese has over 10,000 character that would need to be represented and it was deemed slow and cumbersome. Instead they type using the "latin" keyboard in pinyin (which is the phonetic pronunciation of a written character utilizing only the 26 letters). A program then presents all possible characters related to that pronunciation from which they pick the appropriate one.
And while you are correct this is not ideal, I can type over 60WPM in Chinese and have friends that can type over 110WPM. What would be better, and what they indeed do have, is a tablet that recognizes character strokes which are then printed stdout.
As for creating OSes which no longer have the Latin foundation, you'd need to not only entirely rewrite them (because even RedFlag Linux and such have a Latin base) you'd need to rewrite the languages they're written in.