free look worked in retail, iirc you just hold down numpad0 and move the joystick/mouse. but im not sure if its still works. somewhere they animated snap views, but there was some controversy over that, so im not sure if that feature was reversed. in general id like to see a whole slew of new view commands. i think you should be able to do everything you can do with a trackir with keyboard, mouse, and joystick buttons and/or axes.
for now scripts can be used, like my cockpit script on svn has a whole bunch of freelook and cockpit features. but lately it contains all the features i want to put into nukemod 20whateveryearifini****in and thus is a little convoluted and none too modular. it is however moddable through tables and contains examples.