More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck

It's great, just not fantastic (yet). I'm kind of eager for further hardware revisions, but on the other hand, I've already used it a lot when I otherwise wouldn't have had the option to start up the big desktop for gaming (commuting, or even just to use some time in between things). And while I bought a Switch before, the main benefit here is of course the entire Steam library being available, so no buying the same title more than once.

Biggest dislike is the on-screen keyboard. On the one hand it's usable with the two trackpads, but, I still take way to long to enter text, even compared to a phone screen. It's also very slow to appear and bugs out too often. I really hope that that can be improved so it can pop up and disappear without noticeable delay.

I'm not sure about underpowered, I was actually quite happy to install some rather resource-intensive (Windows!) games and while it's getting quite warm, I never ran out of battery immediately, but yes, if you've got to save energy, better turn on all the options for that. And that's actually quite cool to be able to turn down energy consumption on a whim, or with per-game profiles, etc.

As long as they're going to optimise the experience more and not just keep it as-is, because "it works fine", then it could be a really good platform going forward.

Same question for the dock though, is it worth it?

Did you realize that it's still ~50% increase in weight?

Though agree that OP need to try it themselves, but still beware that some people with small hands get hurt playing deck due to the weight.

One underrated use case that hasn't been mentioned here is that you also have the option to install Windows on it and then it's just like any other gaming PC but portable. No need to faff about with Proton and Steam or worry about compatibility, every game on every storefront just simply works.

Like others mentioned, it’s totally possible to use another launcher. I have Cyberpunk on GOG for example and a couple games installed I bought on Epic.

But, the Deck absolutely 100% works the way Valve intended: I find myself preferring to purchase games on Steam because it’s easy, even if it’s a couple bucks more or I have to wait for the Steam sale. It’s just a better experience.

My Steam account is possibly most oldest active account anyways and I have always preferred it, but if you primarily use another store it might be a bit annoying to have to do all the manual steps for the majority of your games

No, Steam comes with everything you need for games. Other launcher work great using Lutris.

Apps like Lutris, Spotify Yuzu are on the Discover app store which uses flatpak. Flatpak is on many distros already installed or can be installed manually.

(PS: The Steam Deck's OS isn't even Arch Linux. It's based on it and uses Arch packages, but updates come from Valve through their own update mechanism with a read only file system. It's like calling Ubuntu Debian just because Ubuntu pulls packages from Debian Testing.)