Playing with a controller the combat is fine. Even awesome at times.
There are issues about excessive inertia in the character's movement and some annoying inaccuracy when you are trying to interact with things/NPCs, but nothing deal-breaking, and most of this could honestly be fixed by some minor tweaks.
This right here. There's about 3 issues I have with controls and they're all in the general movement category:
-looting. This was also a problem in TW2, developed for PC first. It needs fixing.
-walking/running. For some reason they decided to have Geralt take a few start-up steps before he hits full run. I've gotten used to it and by no means find it terrible, but it's still a bad design choice.
-Horse needing two inputs to jump over something. You need to let off the sprint key and then hit jump in quick succession. Now this is just bad and actively makes me avoid low barriers.
As for responsiveness in combat, this puts TW2 to shame. I have zero issues there. Maybe hardware is playing a role in all this and that's why some people think the controls are so horrendous, but I'm just not seeing any deal breakers. And believe me, as a long time Street Fighter player, I'm a stickler for this stuff.