For me, I have tried several X1 models, Carbon and non-Carbon, and I find the keyboards to be poor. Bezels on keys (is that the right term?) make no real difference to me.

Any Thinkpad with a chiclet keyboard is inferior to any Thinkpad with a non-chiclet keyboard. I often hear people say things like "oh the early ones were poor but they've got better" or "it was bad at first but they improved".

I don't think they've improved. I thought they were junk when they were new (e.g. X230) and they're still junk (e.g. 2022 models).

Again, I am not proclaiming this as some universal truth. It's my opinion, and only that.

But there are a list of things I like about my older Thinkpads: great best-in-industry keyboards, easily end-user upgradable disk and RAM, lots of disk bays, lots of ports, removable batteries, easy disassembly without special tools, easy to replace keyboards, pointing devicer, and so on.

Modern Thinkpads lack all these. Junk keyboards, sealed units, few ports, few bays, not upgradable, not end-user maintainable.

Thinkpads were Rolls-Royce laptops, user-serviceable, a joy to use, and with a long lifetime that was readily extended.

New ones are, to me, overpriced glued-together plastic junk, as poor as any other make...

But they're still black and still have a Trackpoint. So people who never tried the old ones think that being a Thinkpad means an average laptop but it's black and has a red dot thing that they don't know how to use, and they don't get why people rate Thinkpads so highly.