Rude Not 2
I am sorry for hi jacking the post, but I hope you can see that at least a small minority of professional pilots still use the wheel and believe it is worthwhile to get to grips with.
Flyingsteve55,
As I have said before there are many ways of doing navigation and it is up to you what you decide to use. It will largely depend what sort of flying you want to do. For some, traditional navigation is a reason in its own right to fly, others want the most user friendly, low input means to get from A to B. Neither is wrong. What ever you use and whatever you choose not to use, it is well worth having some understanding of the pluses and minus's of all of them.
My advice to you is to practice the wheel and get confident with it. After all you have to use it to get your PPL. Thereafter I would recommend that you get your instructor to give you at least an hours flying using the GPS post PPL as an extra lesson. GPS's are great, but there are a large number to choose from and not all of them are very easy to use. In fact some of them are very challenging and counter intuitive. But once you get the hang of them, they can be very useful.
PS IO540 I am not a robot and agree that I couldn't hold a heading to within a degree for an extended period, but the AFCS can - all I have to do is fly to that heading, which I can do to one degree. The Stab looks after the rest. (basically a yaw hold using the compass as a datum)