Please people try to separate different things.
One thing is control responsiveness. Of course, when you press a button the engine should inmediately do something about. Tha generally would mean that the player in control should TRY to accompllish what are you ordering.
That's not always true. If your player is running onto the ball, you would probably start powering up the shot early to let the player take a few steps and really be able to power up for a shot. The way you describe it, that would instead lead to the player reaching forward and toeing the ball forward instead, as soon as he is within range of the ball.
The game should't always try and accomplish your ordered action as fast as possible, since most of the time, the player doing something too fast means he will do it half-assed or weakly.
Which is why we have modifiers like Control shot to show what we want. If I am not holding control shot, that would signal that I want to do a hard shot, and then powering up early should not have the player trying to perform the action as quickly as possible, but instead with maximum force, compromising a quick response for power.
The other part of the equation is the action times or reaction times, however you want to call it. This should be a mix of things. For instance, if your player has just knocked the ball ahead, he could NOT try to pass it until he reaches the ball again. That happens in Euro and I feel it's great and some people still says it's unacceptable because it means slow responsiveness.
I'm not sure what you mean. If the player knocks the ball ahead so that he can't physically reach the ball, why would anyone expect the player to be able to pass? Seems kind of unreasonable to ask for that. 
There's another important factor that must be counted. Being the controls really deep, there are buttons that depending on how you press them, the frequency or the combination with other buttons result in very different actions or orders. That implies that the engine CAN'T respond instanteneously because there's a little fraction of time that the system is trying to recongize your orders.
I'd say that is wrong. Just because you order a Control Shot rather than a normal shot, the game isn't going to take alot longer time to know what you pressed just because you press 2 buttons rather than 1. The calculation time for these aspects is completely negligible, milliseconds at most, probably not even that, electrons move quite fast. Just consider the 50-100ms ping delay for sending data across half the world. Sending data from the gamepad to the Xbox will be alot faster.
That would more likely be the case for the analog stick which has aloooooot more data transfered than the digital buttons. And the system is designed to not have basically any delay between button input and the buttons being translated into the game.
And another factor in. Controls can be downward silly or try to have some depth. In Fifa playing the game in Manual or almost manual, there's a lot of skill required by the player to achieve things. And you must TIME your actions well if you want to. That implies that the player must perform more things with controls to execute things. It's great to have a lot of modifiers to the shot, for example, but also implies more things to recognize byt the engine and different results depending on the rest of factors (balance, stats, ball direction, power, etc...). So, it's obvious that MORE depth in controls ask for a litle slower gameplay and losing that minimal fraction of responsiveness by the engine. Play Top Spin 3 and you'll see it (tennis is a more simple game than football, it's great to show people about timing, control depth, stats, reaction times, etc...).
Again, I have to disagree. The game knows pretty much instantly what buttons you pressed, and it will also basically instantly execute the right code for what you pressed.
Example: When you go through the menu and press A to advance to the next screen, you don't experience a delay between the button press and the animation on screen. That is the inherent delay of the input device. And the calculations for control shot vs. normal shot aren't going to be much different in calculation time etc. It's just different code being executed.
But after all this, then it comes the real thing: people simply want his player to trap the ball, pass it, shoot, control it in the minimum possible time. Well, look what happened with pes going this way. People talks about player SKILLS most of the times when we are discussing reaction times. Euro had really good reaction times, it was simply that all players were slow in trapping and maneuvering. I don't want all players to be light-fast, to trap any ball in any situation, to do 30 meters low passes accurately to the feet of the receiver. Hell, I don't want the players to perform first time touches well! Just like tricks, even a player like Ronaldo only goes past a defender doing a trick once every what... 6, 7 times? I still remember the CL semifinals, he didn't succeed in a single dribbling in 180 minutes!
So, I would be really more worried about trying to reflect real world skill and accuracy. That or introduce something to make the process of trapping and maneuvering with the ball a real hard task requiring lots of control by the user.
PS: Generally, PES hardcore fans are most critical with the response times, but maybe they should understand how PES has gone past the non-returning point refering to response times.
