Well, the buttons for my 360 controller always wear out after about a year (same goes for the sticks), so this is a welcome step in my opinion. I'd much rather replace some buttons than an entire controller, obviously :P

Still sceptical over this Valve box. If it's purely multiplatform gaming via my Steam account at a greater graphical fidelity than current consoles, i'd still rather game on my PC.

Yea, I have my video game consoles and my computer with a Steam account.  I see no point in getting a Steambox considering most of the Steam games I own are single player and the ones that are multiplayer (Civ5) I would rather use a keyboard/mouse set up anyways.  Screw playing a Civ like game (TBS) or a RTS (especially this genre) with a controller when I can play it with a mouse and keyboard.

Personally, I wouldn't expect this device to be a console in the same way that the current console manufacturers are producing consoles ...

I would expect valve to create an "operating system" and a definition of the system's capabilities to enable hardware manufacturers to produce a set-top box that can play steam games; and developers would be able to produce games that were released on steam that targeted both the PC and the set-top box. Depending on how valve managed it, hardware manufacturers could produce either low end or very high end systems that sold to very different markets without segmenting the market too heavily; in other words one manufacturer could produce a $250 system that played games at low detail at 720p@30fps, while another manufacturer could produce a $1,000 system that played the same games at ultra-high detail at 1080p@60fps.