Yea, I think Cake is geared more to touchscreens than making the same mistakes w/ Roland.  A dedicated hardware controller is a hard sell, even if the V-700 was perfect for Roland-era SONAR.  And if you make your controller generic there is a much bigger market but less integration.  Unless Tascam has given up controllers (and there are making some nice hardware interfaces), anything they do make will have a tight SONAR template (from the git go).
 
Even on Protools w/ Raven most of the mixers I know still use a lot of mouse and keystrokes.  I'd like to see a big touch screen w/ hardware knobs and maybe a single fader.  But that is just me.  The guy that reviewed SONAR in SOS loves multitouch for riding faders, so maybe touch only is the way forward, but I still like some tactile feedback.
 
@

I think a digital mixer with Mackie control is what you need if you have space.

Hello,
 
Please search the Forum topic for , "You can control Sonar As Deep As You Want" created by user Azslow3. He has worked with me on my Zed R16 and QU 24 using his utility to turn these mixers (and other devices for other users) into very capable control surfaces for Sonar in my case going beyond the offering of standard midi and even HUI emulation (not supported by Sonar). I believe his efforts are worth a serious "look see". IHTH

Being my Roland Quad Capture won't work with Rapture Pro in stand alone. I'd only consider a Cakewalk device if it was fully endorsed and they'd write the drivers for it.
 
They'd need to sort out the none Cakewalk Pro-Channels first, to have them act like the in house Pro Channels.

Jarsve
I think a digital mixer with Mackie control is what you need if you have space.

Not that I had plans to get some, but I have tried to check what digital mixers (on the market) can do as control surfaces. The information is just from the documentation. I could interpret it wrong.
 
Tascam DM-3200
MC protocol support, all controls. So, Tascam has already "a control surface". It is a bit heavy and not something you want to put on computer table
 
Yamaha 01v96i
Support HUI (more or less complete), generic MIDI (limited).
 
A&H Qu.
Has midi mode for some subset of controls. Works at the level of BCF2000 without encoders but with many channels (16,24,32... model specific).
 
Midas M32/ Behringer X32
8 channels only as control surfaces.
 
Presonus StudioLive.
Has proprietary communication protocol and support selected subset of DAWs.
 
 

LunaTech
Hello,
 
Please search the Forum topic for , "You can control Sonar As Deep As You Want" created by user Azslow3. He has worked with me on my Zed R16 and QU 24 using his utility to turn these mixers (and other devices for other users) into very capable control surfaces for Sonar in my case going beyond the offering of standard midi and even HUI emulation (not supported by Sonar). I believe his efforts are worth a serious "look see". IHTH

Azslow3 has already posted in this thread. 3 posts back.