However, Steam offers numerous deals several times a year, so it will be worth the investment. In the long run, owning a Steam Machine or PC will pay for itself.

And you also don't have to pay monthly for multiplayer!

Sure.

I have a cheap $250 AMD APU based mini pc I bought off Amazon running SteamOS. I just used the Steam Deck restore USB image to install it. I imagine you could use the Steam Machine image the same way when its available.

No.

They haven't released the current version of SteamOS to be installed on any machine and imaging the actual Deck's OS won't work on all hardware. You could do the old steam machine OS; but it is not anywhere the same as what the Deck and this new Steam Machine use other than being based on Linux.

There is Bazzite, though, which is not the same OS, but strives to offer the same experience.

There are people who exist between "I build, format and otherwise manage my own gaming rig," and "I don't need a PC for games."

My partner is a perfect example. She has my old PC shell, with some $500 of GPU, internal memory, and accessories, hooked up to the TV. She uses it daily, almost exclusively for Steam games and streaming services that she finds more comfortable to navigate with a keyboard and mouse. A smaller, quieter, streamlined, "this more or less will do the things you want to do straight out of the box" product would have saved both her (and I, because that thing has had some troubleshooting) a lot of headache, while looking far more presentable to boot.

Maybe she's the odd one out and the target audience is more niche than my bias' recognize, but I guess we'll see for sure when this thing releases.

The biggest advantages it has over other PCs is CEC and Wake on USB(controller) enabled out of the box. Those are the two features I miss the most on my HTPC.