Kiwipixter:nzgeek:Kiwipixter: Android was not designed for qwerty keypads.
There's a lot of misinformation about what form factor Android was designed to support. The first pics of an Android device showed a Blackberry-like form factory with a non-slideable QWERTY keyboard under the screen. You're one of the first people I've heard say the opposite.
The truth is that Android was designed to work well with both types of input, i.e. physical or virtual keyboards. It needed to remain open, to ensure that any manufacturer could take it and make it work with almost any kind of hardware.
That was in Android 1.0, Google have not added much to it since then.
This may just be because not a lot needs to be done. After all, how hard is it to support a physical keyboard? You can use a Bluetooth keyboard with pretty much any Android device and it should work just fine. Other devices (e.g. the Asus Transformer tablets) have a dedicated keyboard add-on, so there's obviously some decent level of support there.
There aren't all that many keyboard-packing Android devices because they don't sell all that well. The devices have to be thicker and heavier, the extra parts add to the phone's price, and the on-screen keyboard works well enough for most people most of the time.