You can switch to wdired and then edit the filenames etc. But true you can't create/delete files. Creating empty files is rarely useful or necessary, though, so not sure why you'd want that. Deleting files is more useful but that seems perfect in normal dired as you can see what you've marked rather than try to mentally keep track of lines you've already deleted.
The normal pattern, in Unix-like systems at least, is to just write to a non-existent file. There is very little reason to create an empty file first.
In Emacs I can even open a file in a non-existent directory and it will create all the containing directories when I try to save. So I rarely even use mkdir.
