Worth buying a 360-controller?

Bit of an old thread you have bumped here, but perhaps relevant anyway.

Seeming as no one else answered this, on the official microsoft xbox 360 wired controller it is a bit of both, well really its cartesian. But there is no end dead zone. Fully pressed forwards is 0,1 and backwards 0,-1 and it is linear the whole way between those (ignoring the centre dead zone), same goes for left/right going between -1,0 and 1,0. But it is still a cartesian grid, so down and left will not be -1,-1 as on the radial version or your cartesian version, it will be roughly 2/3rds of that and I fail at basic trig it appears as how to work out the actual value has just totally eluded me, either way if you do pythagorus on the value returned you will find the sqrt(x^2 + y^2) will be 1. Or at least these are the results I had in XNA with mine. I have 2 controllers at home (not on me) so can get proper data later.