Hi Brice,
I believe you are correct in that base movement control has been
reinvented several times over in ROS. We wrote our own a while back,
but there are probably other quality movement controllers across the
ROS space:
http://www.ros.org/wiki/teleop_twist_keyboard
teleop_twist_keyboard was based on the old playerjoy utility from
Player, which includes a stop command and has limited handling of key
press/release events. We often use teleop_twist_keyboard for the
Create, AR.Drone, and PR2 (as in the following video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-9sDNnGtIs
I think your post is great reminder that the ROS community could
benefit from a clearer organization of packages, messages, and
functionality in ROS. Such a clear organization does not seem likely
to happen organically without some guidance from the ROS leadership.
-Chad