Exotic Keyboards

Exotic languages call for exotic-looking keyboards. On the left, my somewhat dated iBook with a Japanese keyboard - although to be honest, Japanese can be input on virtually any keyboard. There are several input methods, the most common of which is via the Latin transcription of the Japanese words, which are automatically converted to the appropriate Japanese characters by a clever piece of software. It's actually a little more complex than that, but you don't actually need keys with any Japanese characters on them. The characters you do see on the keys are hiragana, one of Japan's two phonetic alphabets, and it is also possible to input Japanese using these - but most people stick to the Latin letters. The only real advantage to having a Japanese keyboard is that it has some extra utility keys for actions such as switching between input methods (the key with the Chinese characters next to the "Apple" key on the bottom row is one).

Thai, on the other hand... although a purely phonetic alphabet, it does not match well to the Latin letters, and thus has its very own keyboard layout (there are actually two different layouts in existence), and it is difficult to input Thai on a non-Thai keyboard (unless you have memorized the layout).

See this article for some more info on Thai keyboards.