Why such a binary view of the world? Agreed, putting everything sans turn light and wiper control behind a touchscreen is a pretty reckless form-over-functionality idiocy, as you cannot operate vital functions of your car safely while driving.

But that does not mean a touchscreen does not have its uses: Navigation, for one - a proper keyboard to enter addresses and phone numbers instead of that awful rotary thing (or the embedded write-a-single-letter touch thing) that BMWs use is so much faster to operate. Speech recognition is outright unusable outside of the English-speaking world or if you have children or a loud party going on in your car. Not to mention that it is insanely practical on a phone to be able to quickly rotate and zoom a map view for complicated intersections, and having that as a proper part of the car would be perfection.

Media is the other major case - there absolutely need to be rotary dials for volume, station change and muting (e.g. if you get in a police stop and your music is blasting, or you hear sirens and need to know from where they come), but playlist selection and creation is so much better on a well-designed touch UI than (again) using knobs of any kind.