ET3D: Which old school RPG's had ton of keyboard controls?
AstralWanderer: The Ultima, Wizardry and Bard's Tale series. The Wizard's Crown series, SSI Gold Box (Pools of Radiance, etc) and anything produced during the 1980's and most games of the 1990's.
Those which were only keyboard controlled of course had lots of keyboard controls. :) But I checked Pool of Radiance. It had mouse control on the Amiga, and far as I understand you could do all the actions (which were menu based) and movement with the mouse.
I think that the problem is exaggerated. For most games touch controls would be adequate.
ET3D: The problem with touch-by-finger (as opposed to touch-by-stylus) is lack of precision (since you can't see that part of the screen covered by your finger). So buttons need to be bigger, than with mouse or stylus operation and pixel-precise pointer positioning is a no-go. Bigger buttons means fewer can fit on-screen, so either fewer commands or submenus galore.
I think that this also is a speculative problem more than a real one. Many people use touch keyboards on the phone, which have the same problem. I'm not as proficient as many more serious phone users, but I have a decent success rate on a 3.7" display, and a really good one on my wife's Galaxy S2's keyboard. Initially I couldn't hit a 'key' to save my life, but it wasn't long before I was able to type correctly, and these buttons are a lot smaller than my finger.
I can definitely see myself hitting the buttons of the radial menu in NWN correctly even on a 7" screen, let alone a 10" one. They're spaced apart enough, more than the virtual keyboard keys. I also don't think I'd have trouble hitting the buttons of NWN2. Granted, I won't know if that's true until I try it, but I certainly discount the objections of buttons smaller than a finger and the finger obstructing the view.
There are things that don't translate well. Doing things while the mouse button is pressed (i.e., click and drag style) do suffer from the view obstruction problem and would need to be replaced. But these are amenable to the same solutions as the right click and modifiers (i.e., adding virtual buttons on the screen, or 'sticky modifiers' similar to accessibility options on desktop OS's).
Edit: might need to be replaced. I remember seeing a video of someone doing area selection in Planescape: Torment on a phone, and it looked like it could work decently enough.