Interacting with a touch screen that may try to distract you is pretty obviously different from touching the physical controls of the car. Plus, the phone is telling you "Interact with me now!" With the radio and climate controls you are free to change them at your convenience.

Finally, I didn't say it was "some crazy dangerous thing". You should mentally flag times when you are writing a reply and have to invent new, extreme, and non-representative language to characterize the position you are replying to. Likely, those will be times when, instead of actually replying, you are just babbling to no purpose. That said - taking your attention off of driving to interact with your phone is certainly sub-optimal from a safety point of view.