"I am clearly showing my age here"
Well, I will be 60 soon
I wasn't suggesting removing the existing camera interface. That is obviously needed because a lot of the time one isn't going to have anything else around. A camera has to be totally standalone.
A remote interface would be totally extra. So nobody needs to use it.
In fact I bet you anything that the developer at Pentax (or possibly the subcontractor - I get the feeling that half these firms use the same subcontractor to do their awfully implemented wifi feature) has already implemented a config upload/download back door. It's the first thing I would do if developing a camera, because it makes it much easier to develop an automated factory test procedure (you aren't going to have some Vietnamese guy pressing the buttons 1000x, beyond testing they actually work). Then somebody only needs to write a phone app to present the config image as a user interface.
BTW I think the existing interface could be much improved, but that's a different topic.
A touch screen is a good idea but again not if it is the only means because you get problems with touch screens - gloves, dry fingers, etc. I am in aviation and touch screens are controversial enough there. A touch screen needs to be very well implemented and there would have to be a "knob-only" option at every stage... probably that would mean having two user-selectable user interfaces because the touch screen one would need large buttons. This is the old problem with phone app design - they have to be massively dumbed down compared to PC versions, and we don't want to lose any config features.
"so we would think Samsung would have made a phone camera by now",
They have, a few years ago, but the camera was poor for its size. It was basically a $200 pocket camera, with the usual optical zoom, on the back of a phone. The problem with doing that is that convergence in the marketplace between $200 pocket cameras, and smartphones, is pretty effective, to the point where few people with a decent phone bother with a camera below the level of a DSLR.
The best "phone camera" to date was the Nokia 808, which I had for 2 years. Totally outperforms my Samsung S7... or any Iphone. It died for various other reasons. Nobody has since bothered to incorporate such a camera in a phone, probably because it makes the phone about 15mm thick.