Though not completely familiar with the products you mentioned, the main thing to mention here is that the EXS patches themselves have to be programmed to receive the appropriate information, the information transmitted by the hardware devices is just part of it.
This is where Redmatica Keymap comes in and don't get me wrong, it's not trivial to get this stuff sorted. It does take some understanding, as the Keymap software is extremely flexible and therefore deep.
I believe you can do most of it in EXS editor within Logic, but I haven't dared to tread there as it's not as well laid out as Keymap. (might be a good idea to look at the videos at the redmatica website, they're pretty informative and demonstrations are by Andrea, the developer of the software himself)
I am hoping that someone else can jump into this thread with some more info, as I don't believe I am explaining things as well as someone who does this daily.
I have combined the different articulations of all of the included EXS library orchestra (which is I think, the same as the included orch content from the Kontakt 3 library.. which is derived from VSL) in Logic, to be switched with keyswitches. There are also crossfaded sample layers within each articulation.
So for example, I have made a single instrument for all French Horn ENS, all French Horn solo... etc and so on.
But getting back to your original question, there isn't a lot of difference between hardware controllers, as long as you like the feel of them and they can transmit the data you wish to use to make you instruments come to life.
Regards,
Matt