We are playing around with the idea of having our drive team manipulator student use the driver station laptop keyboard and mouse as controllers during matches. Here is more detail on we are planning on doing that.
Well, our team uses the keyboard as a controller during public presentations with the robot (using the QDriverStation) and we never had problems (e.g. unintentional movement, dead-band, etc). In fact, most of our drivers (including myself) prefer to move the robot with the keyboard since it allows us to make more precise movements.
However, unless you get a special application or driver to work with the FRC Driver Station, I seriously doubt that the FTA would let you use the QDriverStation in an official match.
The official DS has no built-in support for the keyboard, but there is no rule or technical reason that you cannot read the keyboard and send it to the robot using the network functions. At least not that I know of.
For most APIs, they OS will blend them all together into one. The VIs in LV will tell you which joystick button is pressed, but the keyboard stuff can’t differentiate, as the system owns all keyboards. I think that RawInput API will tell you which, but I haven’t done it, so can’t be sure.