I don’t quite understand the criticism. It’s not gonna be top of the line, but it’s more than enough to replace my dying laptop from 2015 that I pretty much only ever use like a desktop anyway. And I can save myself the time and effort of picking parts, building, and dealing with shit not working as expected.
I can dual boot my Steam Deck with an external Windows 11 SSD. I expect I can do the same with the Steam Machine.
But why would you?
A) to see if it could be done.
B) I wanted to see if/how Destiny 2 runs on Steam Deck and it requires Windows. Running it in a compatability later gets you banned.
Maybe to play games that you can’t play on Linux.