I don’t mind a touchscreen. Apple CarPlay/Android Auto are really nice.
I just also want physical controls for everything the car needs to do to be a car, like climate control or wipers or shifting. And also physical controls for play/pause, skip, volume, and tuning.
Touchscreens can do a lot to enhance the car experience, but they cannot replace physical buttons.
In my older car, I have a mount for my phone because it does not have GPS. But it does work just fine for Bluetooth.
CarPlay is a lot easier to use. As was Android Auto when I had an Android phone.
These also give me greater flexibility with regard to mapping. I can, for example, simply tell my phone to navigate to my wife’s location. (Obviously not a dealbreaker to not have, but convenient!)
It can also be really nice to have a side-by-side view of the media player and the maps.
I dunno, it’s not like I wouldn’t buy a car that doesn’t have CarPlay, but that car would lose some points in my mind. It’s the kind of thing I didn’t think I’d appreciate as much until I had it.
If it's the kind of thing that it's not reasonable to expect that people will stop by the side of the road to do, it should be buttons. The rest can be touch.
So for example setting a destination on your navigation interface is fine to do via touch screen, but starting/stopping swipers or changing audio volume is not.
I'd go as far as mounting a full size qwerty keyboard on the steering wheel. Although we'd somehow have to deal with the shrapnel grenade situation as soon as the airbag hits it.