I think the difference is that you can touch physical buttons without activating them, making it a two step process analogous to activation on release on touch screens.

512/16 M1 Air used for about 9 months for video/photo editing and Xcode and some other dev.

  === START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
  SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
  
  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        30 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    1%
  Data Units Read:                    73,619,047 [37.6 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 47,465,560 [24.3 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 1,293,036,940
  Host Write Commands:                657,873,357
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       353
  Power On Hours:                     529
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   10
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

I felt this pain a few months ago on my series 3 and the it took a several minutes before it even started the download, only for it to finish with an alert that there wasn’t enough storage to update

In theory, promotional notifications were banned but in practice, it was never enforced, with even Apple's own apps breaking this rule.