Could you please elaborate on the degraded experience?

idk OP's position, but the lack of tactile feedback is probably the biggest flaw of touchscreen UIs. it's really nice to be able to give input to a device without actually looking at it.

it's a mild to moderate inconvenience on a phone, since you are looking at the screen most of the time you are using it and swype style keyboards remove most of the pain of typing on a virtual keyboard. it does make for a compromised music player, though, unless you can remap the hardware buttons to control media playback.

on the other hand, i find the touch UI trend in cars absolutely horrible. it's bad enough that you have to take your eyes off the road to read the center screen, but actually pressing a virtual button requires even more concentration to track where your finger is wrt the button and stabilize it against the motion of the vehicle.