If wages had risen appropriately then people wouldn't have trouble paying the kinds of prices necessary to keep small places like the ones you're talking about running.
For use cases where you don't want to look away from the main task you're performing, it's definitely better than a regular touchscreen.
You don't have to aim your finger at anything, you just have to scroll and check whether you're there, yet.
And you'll start remembering how many notches you have to scroll to reach the functions you need, becoming less dependent on the screen at all.
The difficulty is in balancing the number and arrangement of submenus and the buttons/menu entries triggering whatever function, although the same issue exists with regular touchscreens.