Fair review, nice read for sure
But my opinion is that the controls are not a "big time problem", just difficult to adjust to at first. It took me probably 2 or 3 days of playing before I felt comfortable with the controls, maybe that's too long of an adjustment period for games, but since then it became very fun.
I've played the game pretty much all the way through now and the controls are second nature now and fun to do. I don't think the in-game tutorial is very good, it is much better to learn on the job in the events. The tutorial is nice if you don't want to read the manual in order to learn to carve down the slopes or do the simple tricks like flips and spins, but on the slope learning seemed to be the best solution once you know the basic controls. The half pipe is the perfect place to learn the simple tricks as well as the ubertricks, and the race and slalom events are ideal for learning to control your boarder. The ubertrick tutorial was absolutely dreadful, the real tutorial for ubertricks is in the pause menu of the game when you are in an event. In that menu, you can see a diagram of the trick and practice it there while getting immediate feedback on if you are drawing the trick correctly. I wouldn't venture into a slopestyle event until you are cool with the controls, you'll just get frustrated IMO. And until you are good with 1 or 2 ubertricks, maybe the Big Air events shouldn't be tried too much.
But once you get into the actual career part of the game, the game really gets good. I think the control of the nunchuck to carve down the slopes is very awesome and feels very natural. The flipping the nunchuck up to jump was a bit odd, I just use the A button. Flips and spins are very intuitive IMO opinion (flip the controller up or down to do a flip, flick it to the side to do a spin). Something that wasn't really stated in the tutorial or the manual clearly enough for me at least, was that you must press A before you land or you are most likely going to crash. Pressing the A signals the end of a trick and your boarder will adjust the board to land smoothly. Ubers were definitely the hardest thing to master, but they take practice (much like real snowboarding tricks I imagine). Once I figured out how the ubers worked, at first I could only pull off 2 of them on command every time. Now there is about 5 of them I can do at about a 100% success rate. I still have 4 to unlock I believe. There's one of them that my success rate is about 20%. I watch snowboarding competitions on TV a lot of times, it seems those guys crash a good bit too when they try to pull off their most complex tricks for the big points.
I thought the slalom race on peak one was very tough too, it was a really big road block early on. It again was another event where you just had to keep trying different strategies to be able to control your boarder in such a precise event. The slalom's on peaks 2 and 3 were cake IMO after working so hard on the peak one event.
The biggest issue I have with the game is some of things that seem to be missing. The game remembers your high scores on events, but you can not view them anywhere. That's real annoying. There's no lodge to board to in order to change outfits or boards/skis, you have to quit the career mode and restart it to change your gear. And there were a few challenges on the peaks that were a bit vague in what you were suppose to accomplish to win the challenge, but not too many like that (maybe 3 or 4 of the 25 peak challenges). The Quick Play part of the main menu is useless IMO, you should be able to do a quick play on any event on any peak that you have unlocked on career mode, instead you are limited to one of each type of event.
Overall I think the game is a fun challenge and once you get the controls down, just plain fun. The events are good in time length IMO, and once you unlock peak 3, boarding all the way down the mountain is a blast. The multi-player is fun, you do have the option to play many different events on different slopes unlike the quickplay. The music is good to hear in the background and gets pumped up the better you do. I would of liked to hear more from the DJ in your events and I'd like to hear more chatter between the boarders in the race competitions. If you are a SSX or an extreme sports fan, I think this game would be a great addition to your gaming collection. It just requires a bit of patience the first couple days, which I think will become common with many Wii games because the new control scheme's in its games are so off the norm of what we've been doing before. I know personally this has been the case for 4 or 5 Wii games I have played.