Here are my impressions after some brief time fiddling around with it:
*The grips feel great. Very comfortable to hold.
*The haptic feedback is pretty impressive. The D-pad rocking when in touch only mode actually does a pretty good job of feeling like a rocking D-pad. Likewise, the feedback in the triggers feels a lot like clicking a mouse. There's even a slight residual "springy" vibration after pressing the button, like you'd get from a real mouse.
*The analog stick is very comfortably placed. I was worried about the stick being on bottom, but it's nowhere near as awkward as a Dual Shock.
Unfortunately, I'm not crazy about the rest of it yet.
* The buttons are not great; a little mushy. I love the Wii U Pro, so I have no problem reaching down. The issue is that the face buttons are slanted (A is lower than Y), like on a normal gamepad where your thumbs are coming up from low grips. But on the Steam pad, your thumbs come down from above... In order to comfortably rest across two buttons at once, the face buttons really should have been angled the opposite way (Y lower than A). It would have required the lower face of the controller to curve up more and may have looked weird, but as it is it's odd having to bend the thumb down in at the knuckle to hit B while hovering over Y.
Also, the Wii U Pro with a Mayflash works out beautifully for PC games since Nintendo's reversed buttons map letter to letter (X, Y to Y, etc). It keeps the same relationship between the stick and buttons, effectively compensating for the stick layout being reversed. Here, the stick layout is reversed but the buttons are the same as the 360, so your primary actions are farthest from the trackpad. It can be remapped of course, but it's tough getting used to in Steam's menus.
* The bumpers are pretty stiff. They feel tight and take a lot effort to click. The point of a bumper is that you can just reach up and nudge it with the side of your finger without having to move much from the triggers, and the hard click required here makes that difficult. The same goes for the trackpad buttons; just a little too stiff to press, which may cause your thumb to drift across the pad a little while you force it down. It's not a major problem in gameplay, but I've noticed all the buttons are a downgrade from the U Pro.
* But mainly, this is definitely a controller for those used to keyboard and mouse. I've found myself pretty lost about how to map things, since kb+mouse has ways of splitting up actions that would have been a single button on a controller into multiple keys, or doing the reverse and combining controls. It can be surprisingly hard to map things out just like on a 360 controller while still satisfying all the requirements of the kb+mouse scheme. It's also really disorienting to see random button prompts and having no clue what button is mapped to what.
Using it in gamepad mode solves this, but the analog stick emulation is pretty bad. The default dead zone is massive, and takes way more movement than an actual stick would. Even after tweaking the dead zones, I still couldn't get it to feel as comfortable or precise as an actual stick. And this is coming from someone who readily admits an analog stick is the least precise control method out there.
Very few of the games I have support gamepad and mouse simultaneously, so it's pretty much got to be kb+mouse and it always seems like an uphill battle to configure this to work, even starting from the templates. I've got the camera movement under control- 180 degree turns feel great with trackball on, even to someone who's never used one before- but I'm still struggling with aiming. Smaller, precise movements don't seem sensitive enough with the settings I've used. Also, figuring out how to have both running and walking with WASD movement is a pain, as is the lack of precision with just 4 directions to press.
...
As a console gamer, I can't really use it to play anything competently at this point. It's a pretty massive learning curve. I have a lot of faith in the controller, though. I'll keep up with it until it feels right, but this thing is not going to win over console gamers buying their first Steam Machine.
Incidentally- the right pad's feedback when moving is very clicky regardless of which input it's emulating. Rather than a constant vibration it feels like a scroll wheel clicking as you turn it, almost feeling and sounding like a cat's purring. Is this normal? It works, it just doesn't feel the way I expected it would.
