Ok, I did not get my Logitech Rumblepad 2 to be detected, but I was able to get an older Sidewinder Gamepad (Freestyle Pro) to work in low speed mode and be available as normal joystick. Here's a small utility that will use SDL to read joystick input and convert it into keyboard events (the axes map to keyboard arrows, the buttons to different keys). Useful for playing emulator games with USB joysticks/gamepads:

http://thp.io/2010/maemo/jsthingie (Source: http://thp.io/2010/maemo/jsthingie.c)

For now, only digital pads are supported (no analog joysticks due to the primitive logic that is used to determine direction for arrow keys) and you have to have SDL installed, uinput loaded (modprobe uinput) and you either have to give correct permissions to /dev/input/uinput or make sure that you run jsthingie as root.