We are all diffrent i like the soft buttons. about keyboard going on and off try moving soft buttons to right side and remove quick notification button. That fixed it for me. The buttons can be changed back later than it will work as it should. But i think theres some strange behavior from quick notification button, for example when pressing it it shuts down the screen it dont answer to any touches only on soft buttons, so i have to press the statusbar up and from there press the back button then it wakes up. I dont know, maybe its supposed to be like that.
This happened to me too. I've temporarily disabled it and just set ADW so an upward swipe from the Home screen opens the notification bar. I assume this is one of the issues that is going to be fixed as noted by murdock. Otherwise it seems pretty good so far.