I've found it very useful over the years for practicing instrument procedure - it's certainly saved me a lot more money in air time than it's cost, even with hardware upgrades!
I've never found its actual flight modeling convincing - edge-of-envelope stuff like stalls, spins, asymmetric thrust and other such useful things seem to fall foul of fairly simplistic modeling (X-plane supposedly scores better here, although I've never actually used it).
Re: finding the runway, general situation awareness and so on, I'd recommend to FS users a little gizmo called a
TrackIR. It uses natural head movement to control view and makes things like flying a visual circuit a lot more "natural". There's a good video of this in operation on
another forum (first post, link at the bottom, right-click Save-As).
Save-As).