I wish they were too but they won't. Valve should have gone with ONE graphics/hardware manufacturer and delivered 2 machines.

$499 (high)
$599 (ultra)

The goal would be delivering each respective settings at 60fps, 1080p. unbundle HDMI and controller if costs are that tight, but making it an open market with dozens of different configurations will not help them lower prices and kind of negatesthe point of it being a "console".

Out of interest, how has this generation been the worst for you other then graphics? How are Sony/MS/Nintendo at fault?

when was the last time you saw a game developed or financed by valve or nvidia? now compare that to sony, microsoft and nintendo and then think again.

:(

(I guess the proper answer would be Dota 2, two years ago... All I want is another Half-Life and another Portal, or similar. Dammit.)

You dont really enjoy the Wii U that much do you?

Steam consoles have no target market to aim for, and will flop. Even if they don't outright fail, they will never be a serious competitor to MS and Sony.
As for your predicament, I would suggest to try to overcome that irrational fear/hate for XBox and PlayStation, choose one and you will be much better off than with a Steam Machine.

It allows you to be offline for an ammount of time (30 days, if I'm remebering it right). It's the Steam offline mode. However, if the servers were turned down, the games would eventually stop working.

According to valve there is no time limit on offline mode - http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/864969953572102601/#c864969953730401285

It's unimaginable at the moment that steam could ever go under with it's current monopoly on pc gaming. Even if the unthinkable happened they would just be bought out. If for whatever reason they had to cease business and no one else would take up the reigns then I'm sure they would disable the DRM which is built into the steam dll files not the games themselves so disabling it across the entire library would be a simple task.

There are ALOT of games like half-life, in gameplay.

portal like games:

The Talos Principle  (soon to be on ps4) 

Pneuma: Breath of Life (soon to be on ps4)

Scale (soon to be on ps4)

The Witchness (soon to be on ps4)

The ball (on pc, steam/gog)

Q.U.B.E ( pc)

Antichamber (pc)

That's pretty much debatable: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/291-steam/63506584. People also observed this behavior: http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1i5lkh/2_week_limit_in_offline_mode/. Valve claims that it's a bug and it's not "by design". I don't buy this. Even the link you posted contains several people that had set up it on offline mode and it just required a connection weeks or months later. Not very offline at all.

There are situation that force the Steam client to require an active internet connection to resync data and then you can re-enable offline mode. They can't provide more details about it, but they confirm that it exists.

Every company can go under. I could list several cases of monopolies that aren't here anymore. We can't be sure that they would disable the DRM because:

- It's a closed system that we don't know nothing about, except what Valve says.

- We don't know if Valve can do it or if they need the game's publisher authorization. Steam games are cheaper than other digital storefronts and few publishers try GoG. It seems like the DRM is interesting enough to make them sell the games cheaper and give huge discounts. Remember, there is no free lunch.

- Even in offline mode, they could still pull the plug if they wish. You can't be sure that it is 100% offline unless you really cut the network communication on your PC or block the client on the firewall.