indeed, that seems to be similar to the general tone of discussion over at arstechnica's article (comments) on the topic. all about the games. i don't see how this steam machine thing can't help but increase the amount of games available to run natively in linux/steamOS, but the question is how much and how fast? some minor hackery to dual-boot windows on them until windows isn't needed for PC gaming is probably do-able, but that also defeats the point of the simple straight forward 'console' that it's publicized as being and which is a major attraction of it in the first place.
nobody doubts that awesome nextgen AAA and indy games are coming out for PS4.
And as a present moment purchasing decision, buying a PS4 now will certainly continue to produce top notch game experiences in 2-3 years with games fully optimized for it. Buying this lower end Steam Machine now for the price of the more expensive XBone (but without the Kinect) will not really produce that experience because the games won't be optimized for that specific machine's hardware, not to mention it's shortcomings vs. PS4 hardware like the GPGPU on steroids and integrated GDDR memory pool (and the CPU is still unknown). In 2-3 years perhaps a $500 Steam Machine may offer a better experience thru it's hardware (if the games are there) than the PS4 (at whatever price point it is then, probably around $250) but that is not the purchasing decision you can make now.
It does seem like you should be able to dual-boot regular gaming PCs with SteamLinux in order to mix Windows and SteamMachine games though.
