I have no idea what the 1.x keyboard looks like as I've never seen it but I use the Gingerbread keyboard, which did have that speech to text button but it let me replace it with a comma key. Along with the traditional key layout, my bottom row of keys is Shift, comma, space, period, and enter. No problems with mine.
If you decide to try out this keyboard and can't figure out to get the layout I have, send me a message and I'll write up a quick step-by-step to get the layout. I think default includes that voice button and some other button that I turned off.