I was planning on getting the Alienware entry model of the Streambox, if I were to get one at all, but many users here advised against it because they apparently tend to overcharge. They said that their entry model would be similar in specs to the PS4 and "competitively priced" to the PS4 and XBO, which I assumed means $500. If that ends up being the price, is that a ripoff for what I'm getting? What is your opinion of Alienware. I've been told that the ibuypower and CyberPowerPC would probably be a better value for what I'm getting. While I don't really care about power, obviously if there are two identical consoles that play the same games with the same controller for the same price, but one of the is more powerful, I'll go with the better box.

But the Wii U can't play everything. Nintendo isn't the only company that makes good games.

I think it is an accurate statement to say that Alienware overprices its products. I build my own desktops, but my laptops and tablets tend to be from Asus which have good price for value. 

I'm not very educated on the majority of the steambox manufacturers, a lot of them seem obscure/new in terms of brand name. I know valve is making their own model, and I'm sure they'll try to stay competitive in both price and hardware (all games will likely be playable at a medium level on the valve machine for a few years.) A lot of the manufacturers are priced quite high for you, $1,000 + so you can omit those. Ibuypower and cyberpowerpc are in your price range. Make sure you have in I5 (or better) and make sure you don't get a model with an Intel GPU (they have historically not made dedicated cards - and while their new high cards might seem to be comparable in specifications, they just don't have the experience of Nvidia and ATI.) Other than that, I think anything will suit your needs. But a year from now things might be very different, so I wouldn't go off of what you hear now. 

That's a contradiction.

Windows is terrible and everyone who knows anything knows that. I'll give you an example. Every time there's a new MS Office then the Libre Office suite is made incompatible with Office on purpose just to maintain MS's monopoly in the corporate space. People are essentially forced into thinking that open Office software are a source of headaches even though Libre does 99% of what MS Office does. Not only that, but the monopoly is kept in tact in other devious ways that are too complicated to mention here.

In the OS space, there are perfectly user friendly versions of Ubuntu available for free yet people keep on paying for Windows. What to mention of anti-virus software.

No my friend, there's a very, very good reason why most computer nerds feel disdainful towards MS.

How did you come up with this conjecture ? 

Steam OS as the name implies is an operating system much like Windows 8! You should probably research basic things before making unfounded question such as these. Now there's no doubt in my mind that PC gaming would NEVER be a good fit for you. To answer the question, no Valve will not put out a windows version of steam OS because it CAN'T! 

/rage