Fighting games are horrible with a keyboard. They're one of very few cases where keyboards don't work well.
Only exception I can think of to this rule was Karateka. While not really what most would consider a fighting game toady, it definitely was a predecessor.
The terrible games are the ones that require both a Joystick and a Keyboard...
I can readily think of at least Flashback on the Amiga and Gateway to Apshai on the Atari 8-bit and Xenon 1 on the Atari ST. Gauntlet (all versions on all platforms with single button joysticks) also had that issue where you had to reach out and press a key for the magic.
I think the main reason PC games mostly used the keyboard is because A) they had a proprietary connector, when back in the day any of the computers used that standard DB9 controller. That only changed really on the consoles for the NES, and then the Saturn I think was the first Sega system that didn't use DB9 (probably because Atari decided to sue them). And B) because they were expensive, terrible analog things up until USB arrived. And of course by that time, people actually WANTED analog controls.
Also, if you think about it, a lot of the 8-bit/16bit era games were either arcade conversions or similar, where of course the joystick was king. DOS really didn't get a whole lot of the arcade conversions, and usually when they did, they were terrible.
Oh, and the reason for Gaming Keyboards and Mice... I have 14 buttons on my Roccat Tyon (oddly, I don't game that much, but holy crap for production usage it is AWESOME!), and my Roccat Ryos MK Pro is fantastic for gaming because you don't really have to press that hard on a key for it to do something, less input 'lag' I guess you could say since you don't have to slam down the key like you do with a lot of the spongy keyboards out there. Getting knuckle pain in my old age makes it actually tolerable to type again with mechanical keyboards.
