I forgot to mention a counter example of poor control/interface design... Halo Wars. This is a situation where it was believed to be impossible to implement an RTS very well using a game controller instead of mouse and keyboard. Having played the entire campaign through, I can say first-hand that the interface is pure genius. It works better than I every could have imagined, and it feels very "natural" to use, i.e. - very little learning curve at all.
So how does a company take something as challenging as that and make it smell like a rose, when other companies try and implement interfaces that have already been done well before, yet they fail? I would think that having good boilerplate examples would be enough, but I've developed very few games.
