It's the best or worst of both worlds depending on your perspective, but they do offer superior hands-free operation over a pure touch device, but at the sacrifice of interface flexibility.
MFDs were pioneered in fighter jets, where the cockpit physical space is extremely limited while the amount of information the pilot has to deal with is far beyond any civilian pilot workload.
MFDs combine the durability of physical controls with the configurability and flexibility of screens, and it's completely beyond me why they are not standard equipment in all cars.
BMW's iDrive is, I think, the canonical early example of this in the automotive world.
I think this point is lost sometimes, but is also useful. My car has a lot of physical controls. Some of the ones that are useful during driving are tucked inconveniently below my left knee!
Moving some less frequently used controls to a touch screen might actually benefit some of these designs.
I mean, the other point of a dynamic interface is that you can now have more controls than would fit on a static interface. Touchscreen fit-to-purpose controls might suck more than hardware fit-to-purpose controls, but either option is better than a single set of generic controls that control multiple systems that "should" have different control paradigms, translating to the generic controls being a compromised bad fit for any use-case.
E.g. a hardware English-language keyboard is probably better than a touchscreen English-language keyboard (though people with modern Blackberries might dispute this); but both are better than entering English text through T9 on a dial pad. And the touchscreen has the benefit of allowing you to have more keyboards (for e.g. the multiple native languages you type that use different alphabets), which wouldn't even fit on the phone as hardware keyboards.
I bring this up, because eventually you run out of space to stuff additional controls. As airplanes become ever-more advanced, their cockpits will approach that point. At that point, dynamic affordances may be necessary, just so you can have some kind of "pagination" allowing you to squeeze more controls in. (Hopefully it'd just be for the non-time-critical switches to flip.)