While I agree with you about the interior looking rather spartan and the superiority of physical dials and knobs, one nice thing about the Tesla touchscreen is that things are laid out in a somewhat intuitive feature.

I had the experience of sitting in a few other cars at the pricepoint (BMW 3 series, and a Mercedes C class), and the infotainment systems in there were way behind. Mercedes uses a touchpad along with a touchscreen for navigation, while the BMW uses a dial along with the touchscreen. I much preferred the Tesla touchscreen only to their weird physical/virtual button hybrid systems.