Right now, when a USB joystick (and presumably all other types of joystick input devices) is attached, the joydev module isn't loaded. This causes problems because everything that uses joysticks on Linux uses the old interface (which joydev provides). HAL is able to figure out that it's a joystick, so it should be possible for udev to do the same and load joydev automatically.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 187005 ***