Im calling it right now. Anyone want to bet all of a sudden graphics and resolution does not matter to Sony and Microsoft fanboys?

BAHAHAHA so someone else has the biggest in console country now.
HAIL TO THE KING BABY

steam OS specific games. I wonder what that will give them.

If its the games PCs miss out on plus access to your steam library then the steam box isn't looking too bad right about now even if its on par or slightly below PS4.

Plus I have no doubt they will probably have a more expensive model that is better than PS4 and the games designed for it will auto select features based on model number kind of like games can already select settings manually depending on their pc specs but done automatically.

if you have to use those touch pad controllers, that would suck.

because we have never seen peopel brag about their consoles of choice either? This is why we get thread wars on here about gfx and specs lol.

To be clear, the GPGPU enabled by ACEs (massively more present on PS4 than XBone or this Steambox) will tend to be able to do compute tasks similar to how PS3's SPUs could. Late PS3 games show how that worked, with the SPUs augmenting the seemingly weaker (than Xbox360) GPU to create better graphics. The integrated memory in PS4 will just make that even easier with lower-overhead. These compute threads handled by ACEs can happen in portions of the CU's otherwise unused by shader programs so are basically 'free compute'.

Steambox is not a single homogenous platform, it's basically a spec to run the same (Linux) OS as well the spec for the controller.
There's already several different specc'd Steambox 'consoles', with different CPUs and GPUs by different manufacturers.
AFAIK, there's no reason why one couldn't even replace some components, e.g. with a GPU swap.  They're basically just Linux PCs.
So whether one chooses to game via Windows or via Steam Linux boxes is not much difference, there will still be 'rig' bragging.
This has repurcussions for platform optimization as I already wrote, it is not like MS/Sony consoles, it is basically no different than Windows gaming PCs,
except with a different operating system, it's own controller spec, and of course the Steam service which also applies to Windows games.

Although most Steambox's DON'T, a manufacturer COULD hypothetically make a Steambox with unified memory architecture (all GDDR) like PS4,
except there wouldn't be much point because the platform fragmentation would mean no game would optimize around that to take advantage.

GPU is comparable to the PS4's, and any desktop AMD CPU out there will outperform what PS4 offers. For $500, that's quite a nice PC, considering Linux games run better than Windows thanks to OpenGL, it comes with a free controller and Steam has some amazing deals, I'd buy one if I didn't had a PC or if I was in the market for a next-gen console.

Sounds more like this is just splitting the PC gaming market into Windows and Linux.
Not sure how this brings more games that wouldn't have been made for Windows previously (in the absense of Steambox).

All this is is about creating a 'new' PC gaming OS (really just Linux, with new focus/promotion) similar to how PC OS' have been competitive before

(MacOS, Atari, etc), with this one happening to offer better performance than Windows and lower cost (vs. $50 licence fee for Windows to OEMs)

It's not about "will" there ALREADY ARE (announced) higher spec Steamboxes that cost more, that in fact were announced before this one.
These are not all being made by one company, it is many OEMs, so more or less the same situation as with Windows PC gaming.

by all accounts there will likely be HUNDREDS of models of Steambox, so it is doubtful that each game publisher will make a custom settings profile for each specific rig, leaving the situation identical to Windows PC gaming.

Querying the GPU and CPU should be possible to some extent, but that is no different than for Windows PC gaming, so expect custom settings to remain.

I hope it works out well. The industry needs a shake-up and I rather not have the same old 3 home consoles and a PC as it was for the last 14 or so years. At least now you get 3 consoles, 1 PC and half a PC as I doubt you can carry out any productive tasks on it.

Maybe I missed it but I can't seem to find the RAM specification of the thing. Etho's list has VRAM as 2GB but no mention of the main RAM. Is this then upgradable to whatever you want? How much RAM do you get for $499?