I just spent the evening in the main arena in fighters, bombers and tanks with the Rift. Vulcan is right. The first words that come to mind are Wow and Wow. I was using three monitors and trackir and there really is no comparison. It is like you are sitting in the real thing. It still needs improvement but it is very workable in AH right now. When HT does the full integration a lot of sticking points like unable to see damage, calibration, or vox talker are easily solved with floating windows. You can see them now by holding down the middle mouse button but that is awkward. It is probably the best $350 I have spent on computer hardware in a long time.
I solved the keyboard issue with a hotas and a voice command program(I use VAC but there are several). I rarely touch the keyboard anymore. I use vox in the game and only read the text buffer for kills etc.