How should I use a QGraphicsScene with layouts and widgets

I'm creating some graphic data displaying widget in Qt4 and I was tempted to use the `QGraphicsScene` for it, create `QGraphicsItem`s for the data items etc. However, I wanted to add some layer of controls (eg. scrollbars, zoom+other buttons - I want to make it in a similar style as eg. Google Maps, that is, the data would be displayed all over the widget, and the buttons would be shown atop of them) to the widget. So I thought it might be feasible to add them to the scene (perhaps as a child of a `QGraphicsGroupItem` that would be shown over the data). But I want them to move & resize when I resize the whole widget, so I should use a `QGraphicsLayout` for managing them. But at this point, I discovered things are pretty complicated. The problem is that when using `QGraphicsLayout`, the following constraints hold: - Only a `QGraphicsWidget` can be managed by a layout - `QGraphicsLayout` can only be used to manage children of a `QGraphicsWidget` Which means that I would have to create my controls as `QGraphicsWidget`s, add a top level `QGraphicsWidget` to the data widget, and manage the size of this top level widget myself. So I want to ask: Wouldn't a classic approach (ie. use plain old widgets for all controls, and use `QGraphicsScene` only for displaying the data) be more reasonable? Is there any advantage in using `QGraphicsScene` in this case (performance or simplicity...)? How should I use `QGraphicsScene` to exploit its strengths?