What this "we can change it later" option creates is designs that are not very well thought out. When you have physical buttons you must be double sure that this is the best layout that you can come up. You need to commit and double (triple) check with multiple people. Allocate resources for manufacturing/tooling. But you are forced to think about it really really hard.

With touch screen and OTA updates, you can skip the hard part and leave it for future you to improve if needed. But as we all know, when it's already sold there is no motivation to spend money to improve. So touch UI stays half baked. And only gets improved with future models.