Title = reference to Marriland's Black Wedlocke, where Ghetsis is running for president. xP Not that everyone here will get that reference, but I wanted to for kicks.
Anyway, as mentioned above it overall wasn't hard to see that Team Plasma's liberation goal was a cover-up for what he wanted to do which was make it so only he could use Pokémon, but that twist was not what I saw coming first time. And what's more, before Black 2 and White 2 we were led to believe that N was Ghetsis' son - which, in those games we find out that he's his foster son and not birth son. Prior to that there were so many implications, including that he might have took a completely normal child and messed him up. Throughout BW, I found myself incredulous at that very thought, one of the sages even says he didn't even really know if the two were actually related. Turns out I was right.
And on the battling front, in BW not only is it a nice difference from simply becoming the Champion, as I have mentioned in the past, but he's no easy slouch. I would say he's up there with Cynthia as far as difficult battles go. That Hydreigon WILL blast you into next week if your team is unprepared. It's extremely fast (31 IVs in every stat and a +Speed nature), and has massive type coverage, so you really need to get strategic to best it. Yet in nearly all my BW playthroughs i've done, i've almost always found myself with a good answer to it, like a Fighting-type or a Dragon Dance Haxorus to set up against his Cofagrigus. Doesn't make it any less brutal for the average player, though. His Bouffalant also hits super hard with Reckless boosted Head Charge, and Eelektross has a lot of coverage too, not to mention no weaknesses. That's what his team in BW feels based on to me - full of Pokémon that are slow but have little to no weaknesses to target, except for Hydreigon, which, as I mentioned, just wrecks stuff.
Then in Black 2 and White 2, I have mentioned how credit-worthy it is that he attempts to impale you with Kyurem's Glaciate, and to add on to that, N saving you with his legendary was part of his plan the whole time, so he could fuse Kyurem with it and use Absofusion. It's just unfathomable that he'd hunch on such a plan, i'd say. On the battling front, he was dumbed down quite a bit, and his Hydreigon was disappointing here (much slower, physical attacker that's very susceptible to Steel-types, even with the Life Orb), but he's still not a complete joke overall per se - he did kill one of my pairs in my Wedlocke, which consisted of my Crobat that I had for a long time. And as mentioned above, his music was quite rad.
So yeah, that's my take on Ghetsis, that his schemes were very crazily contrived and makes for one of the biggest challenges in the series in the first games.