They have been doing updates to cars with physical buttons (even OTA) for years now. It's the telematics unit that matters for this. Either way you still have a tactile interface of sorts in the form of idrive and the shortcuts (unless the removed this in the G05 LCI). The thing I worry about is that they stop with the updates at some point or lock more of it behind different paywalls. (eg: with Merc you sometimes only end up with 24 months of use of something before they remove it).
The way I have to buy services on the M5 makes me think that one day it won't all be in a 'single' package and you will have to fork out for either different tiers or for the specific services. Well and good when it is nice to have stuff. Not so nice if they decide you only get single zone AC instead of quad zone until you pay a subscription... or they just continue copying tesla with things like letting you 'buy' a certain number of launches or 'levels' of acceleration... for the car you've paid for and which is sitting in your garage
Noted on the updates, I just dont recall ever getting one for the X3.
Pay to play for activating fucntions built into the car is coming if we like it or not. I already see it in industry, for example we use HAAS CNC machines which we can spec with certain upgrades like memory, extra modules etc. BUT all machines come std with the hardware so if at a later stage I want to upgrade I give them some $$$ and they give me a code and I have the added functionality.
The X3 does not have seat warmers, I would have loved to have it built into the car as standard so I could activate it at a later stage by paying a premium, and from a production point fo view its often cheaper to build all the cars with the addons than customising them.
The only physical buttons remaining on the dash is volume, skip forward and back and some demister function, the 1-8 shorcut buttons are gone. They have retained the idrive controller and the buttons around it on the centre console.
