About 2 months ago I was in a similar place to where you are now. I was tossing up between the Remote SL and the MPK49. Performing live was (is!) completely new to me, but like many I was inspired by Moldover's video. After lots of research and thought, I bought the Remote SL 25 because it seemed to offer me the maximum number and variety of controls in the one unit. As well as that, I already have a 49-key M-Audio keystation, which I use as my actual playing keyboard. And I didn't know then that I'd end up programming every black and white key on the Remote to do something else, but that's what I've done. So my complete setup is: Keystation on the left, Remote SL in the middle, macbook pro running Live and Reaktor on the right.
The Akai keyboard has got tons of good press for its durability and some features, like the arpeggiator. I can't comment on the M-Audio one, but the odd man out in hardware terms amongst the 3, relatively speaking is the Remote. The Akai and M-Audio all have pots, faders, buttons, keys and pads. The remote is the only one with a joystick and a touchpad as well as the other stuff, and it has the greatest number of pots and buttons.
I'd been looking at the MPK in advance and thinking 'that bank switching thiing would be cool' in terms of its feature to increase the number of controls you actually get out of a finite number of physical controls. Now that I've been working on my setup for 2 months, I can say I'm not missing the bank switching - if anything, on the Remote, where everything's dedicated, I've found I've already got more than enough on my plate when I practise.
My feeling is every controller's gonna be good for someone. You have to try to make a few decent estimations about how your setup is going to work, or how you'd like it to - that's what's going to determine what will best suit you. The MPK has way solid keys, but is correspondingly a heavier object. The Remote has pretty good keys and is lighter. Are you gonna be using the keys for actual playing or just for controlling things? Or a mix of both? Working these things out will also determine how many keys you need and how good they have to be quality wise.
I feel that the Remote costs relatively more because you're paying for the Automap software. For controllerism, I ended up completely shutting the automap off. I need all the controls to be dedicated and can't afford any guesswork live. I think if you are the kind of person who, in the studio when producing, likes to do everything with real knobs, not just a mouse, automap is absolutely brilliant for that. And then for live use, maybe if you were the guy taking care only of synths in a band, automap could also be cool. But if you're a one-man band/controllerist doing everything like me - I have found no use for the automap in my controllerism setup.
