As one who uses a 360 joypad on his PC Skyrim, is it suitable to use with SkyUI?

Yes. I use both, and have for over a year.

It's not quite as intuitive as with a mouse, but perfectly fine once you get used to it. The things that confused me were holding the LS to get the columns menu (to add V/W in my case) and pressing it to cycle between sorting methods. You also use RB/LB to switch which column you're sorting by. And Back to switch between your inventory and that of a container/merchant. (It also swaps from inventory to magic if you're not in a container).

As a controller user too I find it to work ok, but as evilgiraffe said, it is not as intuitive as using the mouse. If you are wanting the benefits of skyui and the MCM menu but want to revert back to the vanilla menus you can find a mod called "skyui away", which will just disable the magic / item menus of skyui and give you the vanilla experience.

Yes, that's an option. Personally I like the widgets, V/W and the ability to sort columns, so I find it easily outweighs the issues. TBH, the main problem is that it wasn't well documented at first. So now I've told you, it should be fine

Thanks. I was mainly after the configuration options rather than the new menus. But it seems I've run into a new problem. When I try to install SkyUI into MO it tells me I haven't got SKSE installed, but I installed it only the other day!