I always like the Cube pads. The button layout being my favorite thing about it. They way it's set-up meant games would usually be set-up for certain buttons to correspond to certain overlying actions. Like A for confirm and B for cancel like you mentioned. With a lot of Playstation titles I find myself trying one button for confirm only for it to be cancel, like in the MGS, which use O instead of X for confirming stuff. The different shapes make it easy to know what's what without even looking at them or bothering to memorize them.
Shoulder buttons would probably be my biggest complaint. The two triggers on one button thing was interesting, but I felt it didn’t work. Was hard to squeeze it just enough to get an L1/R1 command without going to far. Made the ground levels in Star Fox Assault kind of a pain since I couldn’t strafe easily. Then you’ve got the oddly placed and size Z-button which just said to me they’ should of just gone with a Dual shoulder buttons design.
C-Stick was a little awkward to use for a shooter set-up, but it was doable. I mostly beat XIII on the Cube, cept the final boss, (had to turn it down to easy) but that was mostly because of the obscene amount of hit points he had, and the ridiculous damage he did. =P
I never understand why people didn’t like it either. =P
