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Warhawk and The Dualshake Controller
You may recall Warhawk from the Sony conference demo, their flagship 'dualshake' controller product. A few of the news sites have gotten their hands on the game, and have impressions of what it's like to use the PS3 controller with the game. From the Gamespy article: "I was initially very skeptical of how this feature (which looked hastily tacked on to a regular joypad without a rumble) would work, but after a lengthy playtest of WarHawk's 30 percent complete single demo stage, I can safely attest to the excellent maneuverable quality possible from the very first moment you pick up and play. The slight delay at the Sony press conference between Phil Harrison's pivoting, and the on-screen tilting of his rendered joypad meant I was expecting the same problems during my WarHawk piloting. Not so. This works flawlessly, and immediately, and allayed any fears I had that this was a last-minute gimmick designed to tear interest away from the Wii."
The real question here isn't whether or not the Dual-Shake was 'stolen' from Nintendo or whether or not it's just a hastily added feature designed to make up for the potential loss of the Dual-Shock feature in future controllers. The real question is whether or not game developers are actually going to actually take full advantage of this feature when they're not under pressure to help Sony one-up Nintendo. The difference here is that Sony once mocked the 'Wii-mote' and its motion sensing features, only to embrace them once they realized that it actually worked - a purely reactionary move, for better or for worse. Nintendo has been making the Wii's controller the thesis of the entire console, and as we've seen, there are quite a few games already in production that incorporate the motion-sensing features of the controller into the gameplay quite well. (While it might work out for Sony in the end, Nintendo has a massive head-start on them.)
Another interesting thing to note is that if games come out for the Playstation 3 that revolve around the motion-sensing control feature, it's likely that they will also be ported to the Wii - or from it, which ever way it works out. This means increased availability of games, which works out for us gamers, though it's hard to tell which company would come out on top of that one. (Something tells me Nintendo would get the long end of the stick on that one, considering the console is already predicted to be much cheaper, and therefore more available to consumers in terms of cost.) This also means that developers wishing to take advantage of motion-sensing controllers won't be isolated to just one console, should they choose to develop for the Wii and the Playstation 3 at the same time. (And eventually the 360, since there's no way in hell Microsoft would ignore a feature like this considering all of the attention it's getting.) After seeing what the 'Wii-mote' can do, it's easy to see that Nintendo's driving a motion-sensing bandwagon right through the industry. Their console may yet be a revolution - in control schemes, if nothing else.
To me, "hastily tacked on" means that the decision to add the feature came late in development and was then added at the last minute.
They found out in the last week or so. See here. They did the tuning in just the last few days.
I highly doubt that they wouldn't've given the controller to them if it had been ready earlier - or if they even knew it was going to work much earlier. This was a "have this work by E3 or else" announcement, and I'm surprised that it works at all.