Yup. I got my Steam Deck for $530 or something at launch and I'm still loving it. If it breaks and I can't cheaply fix it, I'll buy their OLED model for $550 and still be less than Asus' device. Yeah it's less powerful, but it's not half as powerful.

If Valve releases a faster Deck, I'll probably get it because the first has worked so well and was priced well. I'm happy competitors exist, but I don't need a top of the line handheld, because I can always play more intensive games on my desktop.

I paid $600 for a rog ally x on black Friday and they frequently enough go on sale that you absolutely aren't paying $1100 for it. I also use Bazzite pretty much for everything on it (I have a windows partition but there's on 4 games in my steam library that I didn't manage to get working on steam OS). If you consider its use case to be more than just handheld gaming (media center docking etc), it quickly shows its versatility and use case.

I get exceptional battery life, great graphics with little to no tweaking, and while it's not perfect I wouldn't say the steam deck itself is perfect either.

I wish it had a differently styled D-pad. I don't necessarily like the asymmetrical sticks (although the thumb sticks on it are some of the best I have ever used on a handheld of any kind). Once it's got support from Valve out in the wild I'm pretty sure the rare input problem I have will go away altogether.

I really don't like this article (it's not very well put together and doesn't talk about the Ally X in a way that's fair to how good the steam deck is for its price point.

But I do really like the Ally X despite ASUS and their BS. Which I do think is something that should be mentioned more often here.