The fanfare over multi-touch in phones is something I've never understood. It's flashy but phone use (certainly my phone use) is optimised for one thumb, not two fingers.

There's a difference between "optimized for" and "it's the only thing you need".

I could in theory get by with + and - buttons to zoom in and out of a map, but it's way more convenient to use pinch to zoom. But even for the browser, I use pinch to zoom all the time.

You can do things with your hands (fingers) This gives many people an enormously satisfying feeling.

If somehow you could have the same phone but with a resistive, single-touch screen and use it just like you use it now, then you would learn what:

a resistive screens do actually need to be pressed instead of just touched, if you never get a literal sore thumb from a touch screen usage - well you don't miss anything but it's quite painful after a while and adds to a carpal tunnel syndrome

a multi-touch sensor greatly helps when you need to discern and filter out the false positives