ros_control without gazebo?

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This is only a partial answer, but have a look at Dave Coleman's ros_control_boilerplate.

The gazebo_ros_control package is essentially just one implementation of a ros_control hardware_interface subclass/plugin, which together with a node running the read()/write() loop (which may be run from a hard real-time task, or from a regular pthread, or something else) forms the bulk of a ros_control setup.

For a real piece of hardware, the process to setup ros_control is exactly the same, apart from the fact that you'll have to provide a hardware_interface implementation for your platform. After that, (almost) everything else is the same.

I highly recommend to view the presentation Adolfo gave at ROSCon14 if you haven't already.