I suspect they did that to prevent accidental touches of the screen from accepting or rejecting a call that you wanted to do the opposite.
I'm sure this was the purpose as well, but having come from being an iphone user for the last 4 years, I cannot remember one instance of me accidentally accepting or rejecting a call. So either there is some voodo magic that Apple did to make sure that simple push to answer doesn't have a high incident rate of declining or accidental accepting, there is a hardware issue that android phones have that the iphones account for, or Google was just attempting to avoid patent issues. Either way I am hoping someone might have experience with an app that provides the function in question and that is reliable! (And I honestly do not want to load MIUI Rom to gain said functionality
)
BTW I do know that these kind of overlays exist as on my wifes Froyo based phone there is an app called
mylock utilities that allows for an accept call button instead of the swipe method. But it appears that it only works for 2.2 and before (hence why it works on her Froyo phone)
It appears that there are other apps that MIGHT have what I am looking for on the marketplace but hard to tell since most are poorly rated apps or require payment (and unless I can easily read in the reviews or description that it has what I may want I no purchase without someone vouching! lol)