I am making an app now that is specifically designed for tablets. Users are firefighters / incident response. Failsafe and get the job done with a minimum of room for uncertainty and fuzz is much much more important than looks.

So when the virtual keyboard suddenly pops up over half the screen anyway...I end up reaching for the modal all the time. Like, want to just change a name? Click the name and a modal with a single input box pops up for that one field.

I am sure every UI designer will tell me how it is so wrong, but I find the keyboard popping up just so incredibly disrupting anyway, it just feels safer and better to have a modal up while the keyboard is up, than to mess around with making sure the UI allows scrolling the field into view, making sure user understand the context after the jump to get the field in the top half of the screen, etc