It's logical? It's absurd. You can usually pull over a car and get out in the case of a critical hardware failure. There is rarely such a luxury in a plane.
I wonder about the temperature settings. I have manual dials but I basically set them to 21C for winter and 19C for summer. Other than that, I don't readily touch the hvac panel at all: I could certainly do those rare adjustments over a touchscreen.
I can imagine people would need to tune a radio panel more often, so at least basic functionality would be good to have as physical inputs. But even then basic radio functions are usually accessible via steering wheel buttons.
Airplanes have keypads that control complex functions on a screen, going from that kind of keypad to a touchscreen is logical.
In the case of cars, a touchpad is overkill for controlling the cabin temperature, stereo volume, etc.