And the silly thing is, as ridiculous as they are for mouse click/drag or touch use, those kind of dial controls are actually reasonable when coupled to a scroll wheel (like you can do in GNURadio). But Apple has never wavered from "one mouse button and nothing else is good enough for everybody," and scroll wheels aren't really an option for a touch interface.

Ah yes, skeuomorphic design, where you take something that's a physical artefact of the hardware and force-fit it onto an utterly different device on which it makes no sense whatsoever.