Bought it yesterday and I just couldn't resist and gave it a try as soon as I could.
I was worried about it requiring a 2gb video card (mine is 1gb) but the thing runs smooth at 1280x1024 with 4x anti aliasing and all bells and whistles on, I love this era of overstated system requirements!
HOTAS support is very good, is supports at least two devices other than keyboard and mouse and you can bind essentially everything (it's a bit overwhelming at first actually), and you can invert axles (which is vital as the CH Pro throttle is inverted by default for some reason), I only had to set the "force mouse cursor" option on as with the deafult setting the mouse cursor disappears in menus if you bind a joystick.
The game while lacking energy systems is very much a classic spacesim and I'm loving it thus far, there is a bit of throttle vs turning speed mechanic and while there is autoaim it's not so ridiculously wide as to make dogfighting too easy.
I was worried about people saying they've beaten it in two hours but I didn't find it
that easy/short, I've unlocked seven missions and beaten four of them, excluding the tutorial in that time.
About the tutorial, it shares a similar oddity as the tutorial freespace: when the tutorial prompt oders you to accelerate it won't register throttling up using a joystick axle, only by pressing a throttle up button either on the keyboard or the HOTAS it will let you continue.
EDIT
The throttle acts a bit funny though, it's either full speed or brake and uses only half of the travel, Ialready posted about it on steam in more detail.