OKWAP S868: smartphone with a virtual scroll wheel?

This will either go down as a "gotta have it feature" or a "why did they do this" gimmick: this smartphone from Taiwan offers a virtual scroll wheel. The OKWAP S868 runs WinMo 5, has a 2.4-inch touchscreen, alpha-numeric keypad and 2 Megapixel CMOS. Apparently the "virtual scroll wheel" is hardware based as shown by the picture above from MobileWhack.

After moving from an iPod to a Zune last year, I came to realize that while a scroll wheel is nice, it's not for me. Give me a directional pad with an efficiently intuitive menu and I can move around much faster. Some people work better with a scroller, and some don't; that's fair. Putting a "virtual" one via non-virtual hardware though? No, I would have been more impressed with an on-screen scroll wheel that uses the touchscreen for a new capability.