Personally I find HTC's way of doing the phone app much easier to use and cleaner too.
with sense 6 you can swipe between the pages. (call history, phone, favorites, people groups) you can also tap and hold on them to rearrange them or to hide them. So for example if you only use call history, phone and people, just uncheck the rest. same can be applied to any part of sense 6 that has multiple pages. some cant be hidden, but they almost always can be rearraged.
You can dial my name. here is an example. you can get to this screen by tapping on the blank spot above the numbers.
also lets say you tap 2, your recent calls with contacts with the number 2, or a, b ,c in the name will show up. Your most recent one will show above the dialer along with xx matches. taping that will bring up a list of everything in your contacts with the number 2 or names with a, b c in them..... hope I wasn't too confusing...
You can also add a people widget to your home screen, but you will need to add the ones you want to a group and you still need to tap on their image and tap once more to call or send them a message. HTC doesn't hae a direct dial widget like samsung does.
Hope this helps.