I'd be interested to hear the comparison between pad on PC and pad on PS4/X1 if anyone is crazy enough to have both easily accessable.
I've only got PC, and frankly I can't see the problem. I have a wheel, but I played pad a fair bit before release for exactly this reason, and it was fine. I've played it a couple of times after release and it's fine. It's not as easy to be fast as GT, but driving with a pad on GT is bollocks anyway. I'm not surprised a few GT pad users who think that they're driving gods are getting a rude awakening. This is the same stuff that PC sim users have been hearing for years from console players when they move over, this is unplayable, this is so arcade, this is ice racing.
If it's just a console problem, then it'll get patched. And as people are pointing out, there appear to be ways of working around the issue in the mean time. It's a shame that the controls aren't perfect out of the box, but that's why options are so important. If this was GT and the controls sucked that would be it, game over. Here, at least you have a chance to try and find something that works, and many people seem to have been able to.
Console players should remember that the console versions didn't have 80,000 people bug testing every little detail. Squashing bugs on PC probably got most of the showstopper stuff, but the console versions are going to be the bastard cousins simply because it wasn't possible to get as many eyes on them. It sucks, but it's true.
I think things turned out not too bad on console considering, and now that the game is in the wild and SMS is getting serious feedback about what works and what doesn't, I imagine stuff will get fixed fairly swiftly. Whether that translates into a swift patch or not is yet to be seen, because Sony/MS have procedures in place as well that will slow things down. SMS can't just push tons of minor patches every time they fix a little thing like they would on PC, they'll try and consolidate enough fixes for a major patch. That means that consoles will have to wait, but that's part of the whole system of consoles.