I've been looking at them, but almost all have unusable touch controls. (My background is human machine interaction - I've never seen an acceptable stove, but induction stoves are all really bad). Since I've have to replace all my cookware as well I'm not in any hurry.

Functionally, the touch controls make the whole thing much easier to clean, but I agree they are harder to use.

As with the touchscreens in cars, I'm sure it's also about marketing a sleeker product and lowering the bill of materials and labor - hence cost of manufacturing.

Just wait a little longer and a manufacturer will start offering physical dials on an induction stove as a high-end feature, but also realize that it will still be control by wire like a computer input device, not a mechanically coupled control like a (dumb) dimmer switch - since it would be ultimately controlling the inductor in the stovetop via software.

I've got an electric radiant cooktop. It has a number of those features such as easy to clean (just a flat glass panel) and won't heat without detecting a pan and will turn off the element if the pan is removed for more than a couple of seconds. It does get hot itself instead of just heating the pan, but when cooking I don't know that would make much of a difference. You've still got a very hot pan sitting on the cooktop imparting a lot of heat for probably a while.

Don't get me wrong there's other pros/cons to induction but you don't need to get induction to have those benefits.

The fact that induction cooktops don't get hot themselves make them even easier to clean. I had a flat glass electric cooktop as well in the past, it was of course much easier to clean than older ones with protruding stoves, but still, some liquids and sauces got stuck to it due to being hot and I had to scrub with a scouring pad or, in the worst case, use a scraper blade. This doesn't happen with induction so 99% of the time, cleaning the induction cooktop just boils down to wiping with a wet microfiber cloth. The scouring pad is seldom needed and I think I've used the scraper once or twice in eight years of having induction. On the other hand, the fact that the surface is less hot also means that you have to wait less to clean it.

I had no idea that some non-induction cooktops could also detect pans, though. In my mind that feature has always been linked to induction. Good to know it's not necessarily like that.