Reply to DIY Midi-Fighter Project

Hi everybody,
I'm a musical programmation student here in Milan (Italy) and my brother (CionniAsDj in this community ) started me to this site.
As he uses a VCI-100 we just upgraded the firmwire and put the 8 arcade buttons and now I was believeing about building a DIY Midi-Fighter.
My first thought was to use a simple gamepad as oskars did and to interface it to a computer program in order to convert the signals into MIDI data but as the program needs to run in the background I wondered about the latency problems that solution may presents, so I thought about using an Arduino board and a MIDItoUSB cable as shown here, because Arduino outputs to the PC are recognized as Serial data.
This should provide a good solution, but I'm not completely sure about it, so I'm asking for opinions and suggestions.
I like it because I can potentially use any USB device I want changing the TSI files properly.
Thank you for the help,
Alberto.