This hits the sweet spot for me as well. I think CarPlay is the best all-screen interface I've seen, but having to touch the screen is borderline useless. Even the most minuscule bump in the road usually results in a miss-touch for me, whereas with a wheel as you say you can just glance at the screen, count the number of ticks you need to turn the wheel and be confident you'll get it right. When stopped I might use the touch screen because it's faster, but the wheel is still more convenient I find.

At this point I never use the car interface if there's CarPlay available (I usually rent cars.) The only exception is for changing car settings, which unfortunately is not exposed through in CarPlay it seems.