Early video games often used simple controls like pong, space invaders, galaxian using 2 direction joystick ,a simple rotary or linear potentiometer and sometimes a fire button.
early days Arcade , Atari and C64 era games were played with a digital 4 position joystick and one fire button mabey 2 on the upmarket controllers.

However as newer consoles appared each one had to trump the past one so Console makers added more and more controls to using the strategy of 2 buttons bad: 4 buttons good and then went on to enhance it with 2 thumbs good, 4 thumbs better.
SW developers felt obliged to use increasingly more complex control schemes for their games to make the console owners feel that they were getting better value for money.

The PS2 , Xbox ,Xbox360 and PS3 controllers now require players to have 4 thumbs or extra arms (2 arms bad:4 arms good) to operate the 3 central mounted buttons, 4 triggers , a Dpad , 2 thumbsticks and 4 thumb buttons , hat click buttons built into the Thumbsticks and naturally all of these controls are analoge thus requiring players to hold any button in for hours on end and the ability to feather the buttons accuratly at precise levels from 0 to 100% or in the case of d-Pad or thumbsticks ever finer grained positioning - Thanks to Sonys brilliant 8 bits bad:10 bits good strategy the sixaxis has 10 bit sampling for 1024 possible positions for every control a vast improvement over the 8 bits of the Dualshock which only allowed 256 possible positions.

Sony and MS are allready preparing for the 8th generation of console goodness and ways to trump their last controllers.

Depicted is the 8th gen controller design SOony and MS plan to adopt  - gamers will clearly see the value and benefit of this by having more controles it's just better value and sure to sell and the software guys will love it as it will be possible to have games where your character can simultaneously look and aim and move in completly different directions while simultaneously selecting individual weapons in each hand And while operating a telerobot. Just  Awesome.

It looks like someone threw up Skittles on a Gamecube controller.

It makes sense... Its so wide the only way to operate the central parts is with your mouth.

I believe that Nintendo's Wii proves controllers are way too complex for average people. But still traditional controllers will exist in the next generation. They will be likely be upgraded with better rumble. Im not sure if gamers need that many buttons and thumbsticks. :)

Hahaha now if they really do add more buttons then they have learned nothing from this gen. wow that controller would scare me away for good you probably need to go to school to learn what every button does and repeat that every time a game comes out :P

Technology is to make life easier not a living hell lol

Pshaa. Not enough shoulder buttons in my opinion..... How is my on screen character supposed to fire 7 guns at once if there are only 4 triggers.

Until a controller looks like a Formula 1 steering wheel I won't be happy.

The controller in the OP is closer to what i'm looking for.

I don't think a controller needs any more buttons, really. I mean, what would they do? There are controls for moving, aiming, firing, changing weapons, alternate fire, crouching, grenades, melee, action, jumping etc. etc.

What next, a button for blinking? For breathing?

@ stephen700 - I will only accept this controller if you can get a version where no adjacent buttons are the same colour. If you can tell me the minimum number of coloured buttons there can be for this state to be possible, I will buy 10 of these controllers.

NB: assume that buttons are adjacent if their centres are within 1.5 cm on that picture displayed on a 17 inch screen

traditional:
L1 L2 R1 R2 A B X Y Start Select Home Up Down Left Right ClickStickLeft ClickStickRight StickR StickL = 17 + 2 sticks

count the number of buttons on the wii mote+ Nunchuck....
A B Left Right Up Down + - 1 2 Home Z C Stick = 12 + 1 Stick

So the diff is 5 + 1 stick... but take into account double motion sensing and pointer...
Pointer = more evolved stick
Motion on Wiimote = pull Push left right up down twistR twistR = 8 entries
Motion on Nunchuck = errr up down right left? is there more I dunno :p = 4 entries

So yeah pointer and motion is hard to combine all the time, but they can and you have way more entries in the Wii mote than with a traditional controler.

The big difference is the position of the buttons that makes it more difficult to do combos (try up + 2 on the wii mote)

The future in gaming is intuitive controls...not less controls.