Do you mean like a radial menu? I love those and I don't understand why more software doesn't use them. The GTA V weapon wheel is a great interface for selecting a weapon, and they are really fast to use in Blender.
Yes that's right! The pie menus in Blender are wonderful, as is the whole Blender app, ecosystem, and community.
Here's the paper we published in 1988 showing that pie menus were 15% faster and had significantly lower error rates than linear menus, which I 3/4 unsuccessfully tried to explain and demonstrate to Steve Jobs. (At least I got three "that sucks" to one "Wow, that’s neat" out of him. ;)
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, ACM SIGCHI '88:
It's near impossible to convince people like Steve Jobs and organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Open Software Foundation, and even less open-to-outside-ideas open source projects like GIMP, to adopt unconventional ideas like pie menus.
One of Blender's outstanding qualities is that they listen to their users and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, fortunately!
I got frustrated at trying to get pie menus into official corporate user interface toolkits, and took a job in the game industry at Maxis, where you're not only allowed but even required to roll your own user interface, and got them into SimCity and The Sims:
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
