PC still playing Amiga catchup

[DamageX]

Is this thread still going on?

While it's true that the method of polling the old DB15 joystick port is suboptimal, and that USB is also a bit convoluted and known to introduce lag, luckily PCs have (had?) a perfectly adequate port for this purpose: the parallel port. A wide variety of devices are supported by this win driver http://www.geocities.com/deonvdw/Docs/PPJoyMain.htm and I remember some DOS-based emulators also including support (for instance ZSNES could use parallel port SNES pads)

[DamageX]

Because PCs were originally business machines

Originally, they weren't. The first IBM PC shipped with 16KB RAM, a cassette tape interface, and BASIC in ROM. They accidentally failed in the home computer market, and succeeded in the business microcomputer market. They then tried again for the home market, with the PC jr. but failed. The PC jr. didn't really sell until they introduced a proper keyboard and an upgrade module that enabled it to be used for the same stuff that PCs were being used for.

[DamageX]

Banging the hardware was a cheat, it allowed you to do things on the underpowered machines of the '80s

Reality check: software is worthless without hardware to run it on. Rather than slamming what was once state of the art (I don't suppose you could have done better?) saying it was "underpowered" because it wasn't convenient for what you personally imagined was the One True Way of doing things, consider that people who wrote the naughty code ("cheat") actually created successful products.

The trade off was stability

The trade off was that you had to take the hardware specs into account before creating software to run on it. Stability has nothing to do with it. Flawed code continues to be flawed no matter whether it manipulates hardware or APIs.