While it is thematic for Palpatine to ride in a shuttle, it's not likely for him to do so into combat unless he was somehow ambushed. If I had to guess, Palpatine takes a heavily escorted shuttle from his palace on Coruscant to his Super Star Destroyer in orbit, flies in the SSD to his destination, then takes his heavily escorted shuttle to his Death Star or planet. If at any point in that chain there is an attack, he won't be getting into a shuttle unless absolutely necessary and definitely not in a dogfight! But in this game we see him in a shuttle dogfighting all the time. I'm ok with it, but it makes no sense "thematically"

When the President travels somewhere, he doesn't commandeer an aircraft carrier to do it. He flies in Airforce 1 with a couple of fighter escorts. A Lambda doesn't seem so bad.

As for dogfighting, I am sure the Rebels wouldn't pass up the opportunity to assassinate Palpatine if they thought they had a chance. That is basically the plot of ROTJ. We also know that Palpatine is arrogant to the point of recklessness by this point (20 years of absolute power can have that effect). And he is not above using himself as bait in some sort of scheme (both ROTS and ROTJ).

I'd say hold off speculating on abilities until the new Zahn novel comes out, as well as his appearance in Rebels. The new canon iterations will be more likely to end up as game components once they're disclosed.

Don't get me wrong, the original Thrawn trilogy was what began my love for the Expanded Universe, but as with all things Legend now, what once you loved may no longer be recognizable in the same vein.

Edit: Autocorrect corrections. Darn phone.