Originally Posted by PMac

Comparing XBox to an F1 simulator is like comparing texting the cute girl in your trigonometry class to a long afternoon with Sasha Grey.

To your other questions, traction control was used in F1 until a few years ago, but is now banned. Most of the dials on the F1 steering wheel control things like brake bias, diff settings, engine and fuel maps, and so on. Left-foot braking is pretty much ubiquitous (Rubens Barrichello is famous for being about the only F1 driver to brake with his right-foot), but it's gone from being an obscure technique that only rally drivers use to a mainstream tool in more or less every professional driver's repertoire these days. You can balance the car much more smoothly with LFB, and transition from brake to throttle better, but the rise of paddle-shift gearboxes really made it more common. Search YouTube for in-car shots of the footwell in Walter Rohrl's rally car to see someone dance on the pedals.