Valve has just launched a new update for the Steam Controller that should make it mimic mouse gameplay better particularly in strategy games- in the most recent Steam client beta update, which released on November 24, Valve added a new feature to the Steam Controller called ‘Mouse Region.’ This update lets you map certain regions of your touchpad to specific areas of a game window.
So, for instance, if you are playing an RPG or a strategy game, you could map the touchpad to correspond to the ability bar, or the minimap, without having to scroll all the way to it like you would with a controller ordinarily (which would be far slower than it would be if you were using a mouse).
Currently, the feature is only in beta, which means you need to opt in to Steam beta through the Steam client. It’s not exactly a biggie, it’s just an extra step before you can get around to trying the feature.