I suspect that in the author's situation, with "thousands of contacts" in his list, scrolling to the top might be a rather time consuming enterprise.
And of course you can disable keyboards you don't want, but the author seems to be questioning the purpose of having the Internationalization button in a prime (and extremely accidental-touch prone location) on the keyboard at all.
I won't say that any of these are particularly discoverable, but there are a couple solutions to the contact search issue - one is to tap the stausbar, which scrolls directly to the top of the list, and the other is to use the letter-index on the side, as the entire region is a high-speed thumbscroller (tap anywhere, fling to top).
The internationalization button certainly does suck when and only when keyboards you do not want to use are activated, however. :P
