I keep hearing people complaining about acceleration (positive or negative). What sort of real-world affect does that have one use?
In games, acceleration will make it hard to twitch the mouse a specific distance to move the cursor or field of view a known amount.
often the broad movements are done via a reflex request, then the fine control (say, to shoot something carefully) is done with visual feedback.
Acceleration makes it harder for the spine to map the distance to result, and if the game bogs momentarily in handling the acceleration, the motion will be borked too. Some folks, playing games on well tuned rigs, can get off twitch-shots, with acceleration turned on - and that's great for them, since they don't need to move their hand as far to get the same result.
If you switch games, play games on crappy engines (anything by the bethesda until they start using the Id resources they recently purchased, etc...) or have a sketchy PC, then acceleration will inhibit your twitch movements, forcing a vision - feedback - refinement cycle into all of your actions.
Mind, if you don't play twitch games, then I think any attempt at rational discussion is wanking, and it then becomes a matter of personal preference.
well, that's my 2 cents, at least.
dfj