Back when I was in college, my class took a trip down to Sounds Expo in London (I think it was 2007?).
Anyway, there was this guy doing a semi-spoken work set with this blues honky-tonk backing he was playing on his guitar. I think he was demoing the Roland gear actually, but he was telling this story about him going out into the woods and being attacked by badgers before being picked up by the rodent police (or something ridiculous to that effect).
Anyway, he was annotating his story with loads of samples that he'd set to trigger when he played certain things at certain points in his story. I remember it being really funny.
After the demo, I started speaking to him about it and, with it being a booth for the company, he had nothing but good things to say about it. But there was this other guy there too who was talking about latency issues with the pickup itself.
That being said, I don't know how effective it would be to actually play in realtime as a proper synth. I imagine for padding it shouldn't be much of an issue though.