[dieterrams]

I have a design background myself, and frankly, you're not going to do much better for flat screen-based UIs than buttons, scrubbers, tables, lists, scrollviews, etc. This has little to do with touch, and everything to do with 2D design for screens. Better/worse design will depend on how these idioms are used/organized, rather than a radical rethink of those idioms.

That's not to say there aren't good undiscovered idioms for 2D UIs, but there's no shortage of designers trying to find them, especially outside of their dayjob. Designers love trying to invent new and novel ways to interact.

It is, however, actually an advantage for touch UIs that they aren't radically different from WIMP, because users don't have to learn a completely different UI, at least in terms of visual organization/affordance.

You can also bet the Apple designers/engineers who were prototyping iOS UI idioms before the iPhone was released explored a range of different idioms, and they continue to do so.