Yep, it's super important for musical instruments. I recently bought a Hammond XK-5 organ. It has exactly the same control layout as the B3 which came out in 1

Yep, it's super important for musical instruments. I recently bought a Hammond XK-5 organ. It has exactly the same control layout as the B3 which came out in 1955. Physical drawbars, dedicated on/off controls for percussion settings, a real knob to select which chorus/vibrato setting to use. The keys on the bottom octave are inverted black/white to select presents. It even has the separate switch for the leslie which gets tacked onto the front of the organ because Laurens Hammond didn't want leslie speakers used with his organs and wouldn't allow a built-in control so they had to do this as a hack. Totally unnecessary now, but still better than a button because you can swipe your hand quickly across it to change between fast/slow mode in a split second. It's just fantastic. While you're playing, and want to adjust settings on the fly (a common thing in organ) you don't want to be going into menus to adjust things. They made a few small affordances to cater for extra functionality like the fact that you can (optionally) program presets to include arbitrary settings; there's a menu system to customise, but you rarely need to touch it. The switches on the B3 (e.g. for percussion) are now buttons instead, since the on/off status is part of the preset and they use indicator lights for status. But this is a minor tradeoff and doesn't make a material difference IMHO. Before I had the XK-5 I was using the B3 simulator in Logic and trying to adjust all the settings with the on-screen controls, and trying to play with a regular MIDI keyboard. It just wasn't pleasant at all, esp. trying to adjust drawbars with a mouse. The Viscount Legend is another B3 clone that takes the same approach and from what I've seen looks just as good. Other clones have physical buttons too but don't follow the original layout and seem a bit more awkward.