I think you may be getting confused by the name ‘PlayerController’, sorry about that! This is not where the movement logic lives. A ‘controller’ represents a ‘will’ in the game that can ‘possess’ a pawn to control it. A controller could be an AI or a real player, hence the terms AIController and PlayerController. This doc gives an overview of our architecture: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/Gameplay/Framework/index.html
To get a basic game up and running, you only really need the Pawn class. It’s the Pawn class that handles the input and moves itself around. Character is a special type of Pawn which includes ‘walking’ movement logic, and is used as the basis for templates like the side-scroller. You only really need to create your own PlayerController to handle logic outside of the Pawn, things like bringing up a mid-game menu for example. Our Character class is quite flexible, there are some great tutorials and example out there of extending it to add dodge, climbing etc. In 4.2 we made it even easier to do things like double jump, and we’ll be releasing a video tutorial to cover that.