Bungie's own Community Guy, Matt Soell, has been interviewed on VoodooExtreme on how it feels now that Halo is finally finished. They cover lots of topics, from the visuals to the fans' expectations, not to mention the challenges of making an FPS game's controls feel natural on a console:

The main challenge was getting past the knee-jerk reaction that controlling a first-person shooter with a console joypad is a fool's errand. Once we got past that, it was just a matter of putting our collective nose to the grindstone and figuring out a setup that worked. Many, many man-hours were devoted to making the controls work as well as they do.

Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO who got there first.