I use it exactly for that, and it really helps me when navigating in Emacs (holding Ctrl with pedal is much easier than holding it with your pinky). Your experience may vary, of course.
Interesting enough, the ancestors of emacs were on a keyboard where the meta and control keys were in the lower-left corner, and it was somewhat expected that you would move your entire hand to do chording on those while using the other hand for the letter keys.
I imagine that resulted in far less pinky-strain.
Knight keyboard: http://world.std.com/~jdostale/kbd/Knight1.jpeg
Later followed up with the space cadet keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard which added super and hyper.