Wasn't Quake 3 for the dreamcast able to play with PC players? And weren't they obliterated?

The gamepad is and always will be inferior to the keyboard/mouse in an FPS. I can't see a single advantage other than its large mainstream userbase and small size. I think Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree letting players go head to head, and even if a game like shadowrun might do a good job balancing it, that's a lot of effort for every developer to make up for that stubborness.

Halo is fun, yes. So was Goldeneye, but nobody's about to argue that it was the ideal setup. Keyboard and Mouse sucked when I played Psychonauts. No setup is perfect for every job, but games should be designed around the controller, especially since all the computer-like features consoles have been adapting boil it down more and more to that one little difference.

I think the real interesting contender here is Nintendo. So far FPS implementation of the wii has been a little blah, but if the sensors were really honed to work like they should, we might finally have something of the precision of the mouse. THEN I'd like to see a head-to-head