I think it would be nice to be able to select a default keymap to use. This is particular useful for distributions that set the keymap way to late for it to take efect before something goes wrong and you are dropped into an (unusuable) shell. I think there are two possible ways to do this: easy: just pick from a list. hard: from a list choose all the ones which are going to available, pick a default one, then, at boot time, accept a parameter (keymap=dvorak for example) and load it. Thank you.
Please file this issue with distributions. If they wish they can load user selected keymap into initrd/initramsfs and it will be loaded pretty early. We are not going to carry every possible keymap in the kernel.