> Well it's definetly "niche" in that it's not sold in general stores
Is that a good definition?
> and you have to order it 6 months in advance since Valve can't make them in large quantities at the moment
Switches were, and other consoles still are, in short supply for a number of reasons the past two years. The deck was released a week ago amid a historic shortage of the key component and general supply chain issues. The PS5 is hard to get at MSRP, to say nothing of GPUs, something like a year and change after release. I wouldn't call those niche products.
> Best case scenario it is plug and play for Deck verified games bought on Steam.
Yes, this is the best case scenario. It's also the baseline use case that most people will go through and a revolutionary value add in the market. Steam is the most popular platform for PC games and the vast majority of peoples' libraries are on their platform, not Epic's or GOG's. People without much investment in the platform are probably not going to buy a product named the *Steam Deck*. And even for the minority of users that are heavily invested in smaller platforms, it's a step up from whatever other obscure options they have now. That Epic doesn't want their games to run on a competitor's hardware is unfortunate but it's not like the Switch games I payed out the behind for are ever going to run on Sony or Microsoft hardware.
All of this seems like a strange set of criticism to target it with - all other plug-and-play consoles on the market basically require buying new games in a locked ecosystem with no/little crossplatform capabilities and all other PC handhelds either suck or cost roughly three times as much.