I remember the first I drove my Model 3 at night. I couldn’t figure out why the experience felt almost surreal.
The I realized, not having that glowing screen behind the wheel (which also means the wheel itself is smaller than a typical wheel) grants you a much better view of the road and noticeably better night vision.
I’ve never had an app where I can grant access to the car to someone from my phone, and even let them drive. I’ve used it a couple times and it’s been very helpful. I routinely unlock the car from my phone well out of Bluetooth range to let someone in to grab something, or to let my son get in ahead of a trip so he can play the arcade. We have an Xbox controller connected so he can play from the backseat.
Remote climate control is used extensively during the winter and summer to get the cabin ready for humans. Remotely controlling the seat heaters even, my wife particularly appreciates that.
A lot of this is made possible, or made significantly easier, because there are no physical buttons/knobs/switches which would need to maintain state with the software being remotely controlled. I know some types of physical buttons can be “soft-buttons” where the state can be changed remotely, but having it all on screen makes these features a lot less expensive, and easy to add in a software update instead of needing it all planned from the beginning.
The screen most of all avoids lock-in and future proofs the car for all the cool features they’ve been adding and will continue to add. There is nothing else on the market like it.
So bottom line, I’m not saying that somethings are not minutely more difficult, like adjusting cabin temp or turning on the rear seat heaters. But that only by committing fully the vision is truly realized. And the vision is absolutely grand.
Lastly, to your example with the sound system. Of course we have volume and skip-track controls on the wheel. The more advanced input and track selection is touch. Personally I would find it mind-numbing to try to do that with physical buttons. I mean, they didn’t even have Spötify last month and now they do, so I order to have buttons for inputs, it would need to be a scroll thingy highlighting a selection in a screen, or a push-to-cycle-through thingy which frankly those are both awful and not less distracting that directly tapping what you want.
Inside individual sources you have things like custom channels in Slacker/Spotify, podcasts, playlists, even now Caraoke. None of that would be manageable with physical buttons in any reasonable sense. It’s all made possible by the touch screen and software stack.