The Navy has recently backed off touchscreens for a class of ships after an accident. There is something to be said for having direct, hard-wired physical controls that cannot be interrupted by a crash or interfered with by computer virus or software failure.
"Pictures under glass" is a very NOW thing, and they are inefficient because you cannot operate them by sense of touch, as you can a lowly computer keyboard. My guess is that as smart materials develop you'll have buttons and switches which physically rise up out of a control surface as needed.
I think for mission-critical stuff there will always be some physical hardware.
As for floaty touch-screens, if you've every worked with a vertical touch screen you realize how quickly exhausting they are unless you have a place to rest your elbows. They're an ergonomic horror.
We can discuss about it in three different ways, that can bring three different results.
Realistically speaking hardware controls are better than software controls, undeniable. The bridge of the TOS enterprise is still unrealistic by this standard because you have a computer that can be operated with voice control in a very sofisticate way (better than cortana siri and google at least) and six white switches on the pilot console.
There should be way more buttons, to make it that way, and in TNG touch screen you feel like that there is a huge number of buttons in every screen...
Anyway, yeah, it can be!
As for in-lore explaination, there are infinte ways to do that. In Voyager for instance they make this new ship with hardware controls because the pilot (Tom Paris) is a huge fan of 20th century and he desperately wants to have some hardware controls even if they are outdated by the late 23rd to mid 24th century. DSC already did that when they presented the enterprise and Pike said something about deactivating the holodeck because "it never worked anyway" and that's a very good thing canonically because if I remember correctly in TAS there is a holodeck but we haven't seen it in TOS.
Another retcon like that about Kirk disliking touch screens and we can have hardware buttons on the enterprise without breaking the techno-lore that every other trek serie estabilished for the federation
Lastly, vertical controls are shit for humans. Holograms and laser controls are too. At least with touch screens you feel you are touching something. Smartphones also have rotors that simulate a button-feel when typing, but I guess that for a spaceship that is another useless junk that no one is willing to repair if it breaks.
But all those stuffs are good for sci-fy technobabble and visual technothings. It's more about "looking advanced" rather than "being advanced". Warp engines are just ledfeast columns, but are glowing tubes really required for an engine to work?
I guess that if you had to inject matter and antimatter in a controlled enviroinment you should not care at all about transparency but rather your safety
