Good points, I pretty much agree with everything you said. "NoDamnGoodForUs" is a little strong, more like "AlmostButThisOneUseCaseNeedsALittleMore" :)

Interestingly, that embedded device I made wound up being MVC without explicitly intending so -- the statecharts were the controllers. The only conditional transitions had to do with code reuse, where a single implementation lead to slightly different transitions depending on how it was configured.