My microwave oven uses a dial, and it works great. It uses increasing intervals between dial ticks (5 seconds for cooking times under 1 minute, 10 seconds for cooking times under 3 minutes or so, than 30 seconds, than 1 minute, than 5 minutes; I don't know the cut-of points by heart). The intervals are chosen in a way that they're precise where they need to be, and large where they don't need to be precise. It's really easy and fast to set the time you need.

It's a bit limited, in the sense that you can't set the time to e.g. 17:27. But who needs that?

When my old mechanical kitchen timer died on me, I bought a digital one with a dial, in the hope that it work the same way as the one on my microwave oven. Boy was I wrong. It kinda increases the interval when you spin it faster, but in a completely unpredictable and impractical way.

So I guess it's easy to make impractical dials, but it certainly is possible to make very well functioning dials as well.