Grew up on controllers, and never really played fighting games in an arcade before. Only fighting game I play half-seriously is BlazBlue on both consoles, and I think I do pretty well with just the controller. For the 360, I have to use the analog stick because the d-pad on it sucks, but other than dashing the analog stick is really smooth to do inputs on. The PS3's d-pad is great, except I have a little trouble doing half-circle forward motions on it. That said I've kind of wanted to try an arcade stick since they're apparently that much more accurate, but I'm not in a big hurry to shell out a fortune for one.