There is good integration between the Artist series of controllers and Cubase. I was able to control 3rd party plugins as well as the SB stuff fairly easily.
I own the MCU Pro as well and can attest to an Artist controller being a better controller in concept.
Everything broke down for me (and I eventually sold the Artist Control) because the Eucon adaptor was just awful on my system. It kept crashing and loosing programming on such a random (but regular) basis that it just drove me nuts. I worked many hours with the good people at Avid trying to resolve the problems, but in the end, it was just too much. Many, many other people had the same problems I had so I surmised that the software was just poorly written and sadly said goodbye.
Maybe things work better now. Hope this helps.
-Rich