I'm glad I'm not the only one to have issues with this feature. However, I think I should post an update.
I recently had to travel to the Midwest and ended up putting approximately 2,000 miles on the car. This really gave me an opportunity to learn the ins and outs of the car, particularly the navigation. As much as I find the "circle" feature annoying most of the time, I will admit that I did find the feature useful while on a trip. It was helpful for finding the distance to a city or POI during my trip. I also found out how to set the navigation to snap back to my position automatically after some time when using this feature (it's in the Navigation Setup). This really makes my life a lot easier. Personally, I think the feature should be able to be disabled if the driver doesn't want to use it and then enable it when the driver wants to use it.
One final thing, ironically somewhere along the line I set up the tune knob to zoom in and out of the map and only realized this out tonight.

But, what good is a nav system if the zoom cannot be used by pinching the screen? Isn't that the whole point of a touch screen nav system?