Touch buttons are so much better on stoves than rotating knobs. Its not just a design gimmick. I used stoves with both, and with the touch buttons cleaning the stove after cooking it's a matter of wiping once. With the knobs on the other hand it's really hard to clean, you might need to remove them clean them and replace them.
From your post I assume that the stoves you tried had the rotating knobs on top of the stove (where the touch controls in the above picture are?)
That in fact sounds like a really bad idea, but in the European countries where I have lived, the typical "good ol' knob" stove had the knobs placed vertically right above the oven, not on the top of the stove. Like this:
So the problem you mention doesn't exist because the knobs aren't something you have to clean after cooking, you're OK cleaning them once per week.
I personally prefer the knobs because stoves with touch buttons tend to beep and turn themselves off when water or oil gets on the controls, which is a quite common circumstance when they're 2 or 3 cm away from a boiling pot. I don't know who had the great idea of designing controls that don't work when wet and putting them in a place that will very often get wet - OK, if you are careful you can avoid it, but I shouldn't need to be careful with that when cooking. Sometimes (e.g. for cooking a big crab) it's very convenient to fill a pot almost to the brim with water for boiling and just dry the water that comes out afterwards, with the touch buttons you just can't do that.
The real problem with these new UIs is lack of choice. I can live with the touch buttons, but my grandma can't, she's 86 and she just doesn't learn new interfaces at that age. Her stove recently broke and we had a really hard time to find another vitroceramic one with knobs, because apparently they don't make them anymore. We finally found an old model somewhere and probably paid it quite overpriced.
I'm pretty sure the only reason those touch buttons are being put on appliances is because they are both much cheaper to manufacture than knobs or physical switches, while at the same time looking modern.
