Strange... Just recently one of my clients installed seven new G5 iMacs... which included the Mighty Mouse... to replace the aging G4 iMacs. The seven women who use them had absolutely NO problem in adjusting to the new mouse although they had been using the single button mouse for years. They really appreciated the new functionality of the scroll ball.
Macs have not been "single button" only machines for years. Simply plug in a multi-button mouse and it works. The right click brings up contextual menus, just as it does on a PC. As to whether it works in a specific application, that is dependent on whether the app is native OS X and followed Apple's programming guidelines. Almost all "Classic" apps (OS 9 and older) will not use the ball.
I suspect that someone may have adjusted the mouse you were using to be far too sensitive to movement.
I suspect that someone may have adjusted the mouse you were using to be far too sensitive to movement.
It's quite possible; as I said this was a newly-installed demo unit, so anyone could have come into the store earlier in the day and messed around with whatever settings they wanted. Maybe different settings would have made the inadvertent clicks and the lack of resistance from that ball change. But I still can't figure out why they made that ball so small. I spent about a half-hour playing with this computer (just to get a feel for it and to see whether OSX is at all intuitive for a long-term Windows user), and I really think the scroll ball was the thing that stood out the most, because it seems like a logically good idea to have a 2-D scroll wheel, but it was like Apple tried to implement it badly because making the thing big enough and adding some resistance would have been so easy to do. But, as you said, the resistance may have been software-adjustable.