The player, component or controller?

One thing I'm having a hard time deciding on is whether I should allow the player to interact directly with the entity as a component or use a controller-controllable pattern. The benefit of the component system is that it effectively shows player actions to be simply a function of the game entity, as if the player itself was sitting inside. The benefit of the controllable method is that it provides a very clean and clear way in which new types of input can be read and output to the players entity. I'm not entirely sure which route I'm going to take yet...