Here's my ideal gamepad layout.
Left Stick X Axis - Rolling
Left Stick Y Axis - Throttle Control (High deadzone, so you don't mess with throttle easily while rolling)
Left Stick Click - Afterburner
Right Stick X Axis - Turn Left/Right
Right Stick Y Axis - Pitch
Right Stick Click - Target Object in Reticle
A / Cross - Next Target
----Hold to target escort
X / Square - Next Hostile
Y / Triangle - Target Subsystem/Weapon
----Hold to toggle whether targeting subsystems or weapons
B / Circle - Match Speed
Right Trigger / R2 - Fire Primary
Right Bumper / R1 - Next Primary Weapon
Left Trigger / L2 - Fire Secondary
Left Bumper/ L1 - Cycle Secondary (hold to toggle dual-firing mode)
D-Pad Up - Fire Countermeasure
D-Pad Down - Start Shield Distribution mode, press the corresponding D-Pad direction to distribute shields, action will end after a few seconds of inactivity.
----Hold to evenly distribute shields.
D-Pad Right - Start Gauge Adjustment mode, use d-pad to select a gauge item, and d-pad up and down to adjust them. Mode will end after a few seconds of inactivity.
----Hold to reset gauges.
D-Pad Left - Communications / Orders menu (When doing this, D-Pad Up / Down select the order, and D-Pad Right gives the selected order, D-Pad Left to go up a menu or cancel.)
Select - Hold for 2 seconds to initiate warpout (Hold used to prevent accidentally warping out during a mission, which would really suck)
Pause - A sort of pause menu, to go to options, quit, etc. Duh.
As far as I know, this gives a fairly large level of control without leaving much out or being too confusing.
Seems quite good to me. The last time I played FS2 with a gamepad, it actually handled somewhat well. Of course changes will have to be made to support all of the above, I think it should work out well.
Anyway. If there was a console port, here would be some things I would like to see:
-Either a re-designed menu or make it more obvious what room you're going into in the mainhall, perhaps you can have target boxes [just like in the game!] around the selected room and draw a text label right under it?
-Multiplayer. Preferably splitscreen, but it might get tough to read text. Would still be nice to have though.
-Online Multiplayer. Well, that's a given. Something like SquadWar would also be nice.
-FS1 and/or 2 ported as either a bonus edition or XBLA/PSN Arcade? If that's too much, then perhaps simply porting the campaigns over might do.
Otherwise, I could see a console port doing fairly well.