Is Pratītyasamutpāda just cause and effect? Considering the formulation of Pratītyasamutpāda (dependent arising)


  When this is, that is. 
  From the arising of this comes the arising of
  that. When this isn't, that isn't. From the cessation of this comes
  the cessation of that.


Is this essentially the same as the mundane understanding of cause and effect e.g. I hit a ball and the ball moves? If it isn't (as I strongly suspect) then what is it about the formulation that makes it more than this. In fact so much more than this, Pratītyasamutpāda being one of the central teachings of Buddhism.
One must be quite careful with this formula. In fact it never mentions causation and in general early Buddhist texts do not. Even if it purported to be a theory of causation, it tells us nothing at all about causation. It simply tells us that one thing arises in the presence of another and ceases in its absence. 

Causality is a very tricky subject. As David Hume pointed out in the 1700s one never sees "causation" one only ever sees sequence. We assume that when one event follows another in close proximity in space and time. But the assumption is impossible to prove one way or another, and we a frequently wrong about it. Immanuel Kant argued that the idea of "causation" is something that we humans bring to the interpretation of sense experience, a preconceived notion that we use to make sense of experience. So "causation" is still not something we can observe, but something we assume must be present because we cannot conceive of the world any other way. 

The formula of conditionality specifically refers to the arising of the items on the list of twelve nidānas. Although I think we can better understand it as applying to experience arising from the contact between sense-object, sense-faculty, and sense-cognition. One image for understanding it is that it's like relationship between the foundations, walls and roof of a house. The foundations must be in place for the walls to stand, but the foundations certainly don't cause the walls. And similarly for the walls and roof. 

So the short answer is that imassmim sati idaṃ hoti formula is emphatically not intended as a theory of cause and effect. The early Buddhists were interested in the conditions that contributed to the arising of experience, which they also called "dukkha". 

That said, later Buddhists tried to apply this idea conditionality to many things besides experience, creating huge unresolved philosophical problems. And at the same time it is often presented these days as a theory of causation - even by quite clever people who should know better. So modern Buddhists are often quite confused about what the imassmim sati idaṃ hoti relates to and attempts to describe.