Actually, many of the very early airplanes had steering wheels, simply because those were in use in other means of transportation as well. And wheel like yokes were in use throughout the history of aviation, especially in bombers and transport aircraft. So nothing really special about having them.
Personally i do not really care if we use a yoke or a sidestick although the sidestick has certain space advantages especially in transport aircraft where manual flying is done less than 5% of the time anyway (yes, even with flying manually up to cruising and back down from there). What i do care about is how the flight control mechanic behind the stick or yoke is designed, and i have to say i do like the boeing way there much more than the airbus one. If you could combine both the boeing flight control mechanic with a sidestick it would be great.