The extra second of delay when channel surfing is to give you time to react and stop it before it jumps to the next station. You can't always drive (safely) with your hand on the radio.
Most radios have a "scan" mode where they will surf through stations and you can stop it with one click. And vast parts of the country don't have a station on every channel like we do here.
For me what it boils down to is:
how often do I went to manually tune in a station (presumably because its signal is so weak the radio thinks I'd prefer to skip it) vs how often do I want "the next station". Answer: not very often. And I don't see the forced delay as particularly safer...
I have a UI beef about XM radio. They don't even have a convenient tune/scan function. They give you the option of flipping through channels and see what they're playing before you decide to go there. I can see the convenience of doing it that way. . .but while driving?