It is pretty common for gamers to discuss which control scheme is better for FPS games. I'll go ahead and state my opinion up front that a mouse is way better for aiming in an FPS and for that reason, PCs win outright in the competition for better First Person Shooter controls. However, despite the fact that many game developers seem to think that shooters are the only kind of game in the world, there are many other kinds of games that people make and that are fun to play. Perhaps a better way to look at these control schemes is to consider their roots.
The console controller with dual analog sticks that is the prevalent control scheme for console games (they even have them on the wii classic controller) first appeared in the late 90s and seems to have won out due to the increased precision of control over a simple direction pad or camera buttons for the 3d games that were being released. Analog sticks provide a much needed increase in the number of levels of movement available so that the player can in theory move exactly where he wants to. In practice, the issue is nearly always bad camera control, either with automatic camera movement, or with player controlled movement that can sometime be too sensitive, or too slow, or both. Camera control is a very hard problem for console games.
For this same reason, first person shooters do not work well with an analog stick camera control. If you turn the sensitivity way up to be able to turn around fast enough, you lose the ability to make small movements to aim accurately, while if you have the sensitivity low enough to be able to aim accurately, you can no longer turn around fast enough to deal with threats behind you (or circling around you). The mouse somewhat solves this problem, although there is still a limit to how far it can move, based on the size of the mousepad. In practice, there is nearly always a sensitivity level you can choose for a mouse that allows for all of the necessary movements quick enough while maintaining the subtle precision aiming capabilities.
The weakness of PC controls comes from the keyboard, which was designed to mimic the text input of a typewriter. The keyboard is quite good when you need to input text, which is occasionally important for some video games (particularly ones with text chat in multiplayer). However, when used to control movement, the keyboard is much less accurate and only provides two options for each direction of control, on or off. If you want to move forward, you can press the move forward button (usually 'w') and you move forward, but you can't really slow down your movement by only pressing it halfway down. The common solution is to have a speed modifier button for "sneak", "walk" and "run" speeds. This input is still a digital choice and does not allow for the full analog selection provided by an analog stick. Thus for precision of character movement, a console analog stick wins out. A key point to realize is that for FPS games it is much more important to be able to face and aim the right way than it is to be able to move to a slightly more precise position, giving PC controls the advantage. In platformers, where precision of movement is more important, the analog input of controllers wins out every time.
In this post I've discussed the two control schemes I deal with most of the time in my gaming, however there are many more possible controls that have been explored that you can read about on wikipedia. Touch screens and motion sensors seem to be a newer input type that is growing in install base, but I believe there has yet to be seen a game that best uses those inputs for gaming. FPS games control poorly, or at least non-intuitively using motion and touch controls. I am excited to see what things people can come up with to innovate gaming.
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