I do believe this will emulate Playstation games, if that's what you're looking for.
arlandi - I think the controls look hard to use because he's also trying to hold a camcorder while making this video. From everything everybody's said, including a walk in Pandora Forum's member, the controls are great.
Battery life is very subjective, but 10 hours of moderate use - i.e. gaming without bluetooth, wifi, and constant %100 CPU usage is the claim. (Think any homebrew gaming, nintendo gaming, even quake 1/2 for that matter. I don't know what it looks like if you're doing Quake3, Doom3 - if/when it releases, or N64 emulation, or constantly playing movies.)
Once you start turning wireless on, the battery life goes down. I suspect if you play multi-player QIII with wifi for multi-player and bluetooth for your headphones/mic while playing your own music in the background...well, battery life will likely be less than 10 hours. :-b (I haven't tested this and don't know how well it will multi-task with later game engines running.)
The biggest challenge the team has faced is simply getting the device out the door. We're SO CLOSE now...but not there yet. The latest - hopefully final - molds are supposed to ship tomorrow to be tested. (I don't believe that this interferes with the CE testing. Just a little bit of shrinkage, a slightly wider slot for the video cable, and shoulder pads were fixed.) I don't know how long it will take to receive and test the molds.
There are about 4,000 people who have pre-orders in, and I expect the guys at the tail end of the list to receive theirs in February. If NOTHING goes wrong, those folk could see them mid/late January. If the cases need to be tweaked some more and anything else happens, it could be pushed back further, though I doubt this. Where's that bare wood... *knock* *knock*.
After that, things SHOULD be much smoother. With molds finished - and more than 4k of them produced in the first run, the initial boards mass produced, and all the shipping kinks worked out, the round 2 of orders ought to smoother, and really exciting. I think a lot of projects are kind of on a holding cycle while people wait for their hardware.