Great idea!
I've got the Xplane sims on my iphone, but I'd never thought of using it as an ancillary controller.
I'm a sys admin, not a programmer, but my programmer colleagues tell me that Android is easier to code for than Iphone, as Android is Java and Iphone is some funky C dialect, C# I think.
There are certainly "mouse" programs for the Iphone, so the idea is not as far fetched as one may at first think.
Nice out of the box thinking