Whitecroc: I recall showing PD to a couple of friends, and before we'd even started they wanted to play GoldenEye. I stubbornly refused to switch cartridge, however, and after that they wouldn't even hear of playing GoldenEye. It's much more than a reskin. :)
As for the controller, well, I agree it looked really weird. I think I've used the left-most prong only twice (Shadow of the Empire camera control - and I'll have you know I barely played that game; also, you could map different guns to the D-pad in Jet Force Gemini), and I've owned and played a lot of N64 games. So, you don't really need three hands to play the N64 - in fact, the vast majority of games don't even use the first prong of the controller, unless you for some reason deicde to use another control scheme.
Agreed x2.
It's a strange controller but I dunno...I really love it. They could've designed it more efficiently probably cause like you said the entire left half is basically useless.