I'm still a bit unsure what the point of this is. I have a feeling the actual device Valve is working on is going to be very different from what most of the speculation is talking about.
- It has to run Windows to play Steam games
- Microsoft probably won't work with Steam to make a Windows-powered console, since they have the Xbox to worry about
- Valve says they "don't want to make the hardware themselves"
What this leads me to believe is that it's going to be a special gaming PC, and nothing more. Calling it a console doesn't really make sense to me because it's going to have all the qualities of a PC (except maybe no monitor or keyboard/mouse). All in all it's hard to make sense of it, but for now I'm not
too excited.