Originally I didn't elaborate on my thoughts, since I figured I didn't have anything to say that you haven't already discussed. I decided to post this just in case, though, and for others who might read this.
A big thing to remember about shortcut keys is that different players will have different keyboard layouts. QWER/ASDF keys are all right next to each other on your keyboard, if that's the intent, but on someone else's they may not be; so if you go with that option, you would want to bind to physical keys rather than logical ones to keep them all together, since the actual key value doesn't matter. For mnemonic shortcuts you'd of course want to bind to the logical key - unless you actually need something else to remain consistent, like WASD movement (it looks like you don't need this, though). Mixing the two runs the risk of overlapping shortcuts on some layouts. You could write some kind of dynamic startup binding script that takes this all into account, but there are a lot of keyboard layouts in the world; it seems like it'd be hard to truly account for all of them. I'm not sure if there's a reliable way to deal with this.
This is the problem I ran into with my last game, since I needed (well, wanted) the six top left keys to default to movement. I decided to just bind everything by location, based on English QWERTY mnemonics, and also provide a rebinding menu. This means that inventory for example isn't always bound to I, but the player can change it if they don't like it.
There's also the question of if you are supporting multiple languages. For a complex strategy game that only runs in (for example) English, it's fair enough to have mnemonic bindings based on English; if you can also play it in German, though, the English bindings may not make sense anymore. In this case, you could have different defaults based on the selected language, or you could just leave them the same and let the player change them on their own. Even if you only support one language, though, players still might want different shortcut keys that correspond to their native language. So, again, rebindable keys are important.
One possible issue I could see with more spread-out keys like the layout on the right is that they might not be as accessible for some players, such as players who only have the use of one hand. Those players might want a layout more like the one on the left, so once again, a rebinding option is valuable.
I tend to agree with 40wattstudio that mnemonic shortcuts are the way to go for a strategy game, but I can see arguments for both sides. Hopefully I've also made the case for making the shortcuts rebindable, though. No default layout will work for everyone, so rebinding really is important, and once you have that, the importance of choosing the "right" defaults is greatly diminished, since they are now just a suggestion and not the law.