If you're that hard on for 3-4 hours of battery life on a Switch 2, you don't even need some giant ass battery pack, a cheap slim one that provides a bit more juice is no big deal.

Isn't the Switch 2 in portable performance mode rendering at 640x360p to create a 720p image and quite soft and undetailed and from what Digital Foundry says Switch 2 fps tanks in really intensive fire fights almost to the point of being unplayable. Also I thought I'd seen a battery life comparison and the Steam Deck was comfortably superior to Switch 2. It only has a 15W TDP and a larger battery capacity. A quick google shows Cyberpunk on Steam Deck can be 1.5 to 5 hours depending on settings and model. Good performance vs battery runtime looks around 3 hours. Switch 2 appears to be 2-2.5 hours so comparable but if anything a little lower.

Every Switch 2 mode has  dynamic resolution scaling combined with DLSS. Handheld performance mode can go as low as 360p or as high as 720p, but it doesn't stay there. It varies based on workload. It is meaningful to talk about the average internal resolution. Really no reason to play the SW2 version in performance mode anyway, currently.

The Steam Deck Golden 40 settings (which is what SW2 Performance should be compared to, since both aim for a 40fps target but in reality vary between 30 and 40fps) is using FSR 2.1 Balanced, which is internally 470p. FSR2.1 is also a lot worse than DLSS. 

Once you start talking about using FSR 4 on the Steam Deck you are talking about at best a locked 30fps with drops, like SW2 Quality. 

The Digital Foundry tests you are alluding to are mostly worst-case what-if scenarios. When playing the game regularly, SW2 is mostly at or near its 30fps target. 

You answered your battery life question. 1.5 (for LCD, max TDP)< 2 hours. Nobody is getting 5 hours in Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Deck. That would require running the TDP like 7W, which isn't going to give you a playeable experience. Most people are running the game at a full 12W. 

Here is a Steam Deck OLED vs. SW2 comparison at max TDP. They have roughly the same battery life.

This is what Handheld Quality SW2 vs. Steam Deck FSR4 Performance, which both perform very similarly, look like.

This model is around 45 euros right now in most stores (it's not available on Amazon Spain right now). Having to buy a separate accessory just to get more battery life on the Switch 2 seems expensive to me.

Having said that, using a power bank to get a decent battery life also shortens the battery's lifespan, because you are exposing the battery to more charge cicles. If the battery itself had a bigger capacity, this would not be a problem.

Microsoft is betting big on this Xbox ROG, even going against their deal with Nintendo to port CoD to make their handheld more appealing. It will fail in the competition vs Switch 2 but Microsoft is doing all they can to prop their device up.

I don't think that's what is happening, if it was they wouldn't be porting Indiana Jones.

The more likely story is that Switch 2 devkits arrived too late for this year's COD.

MS may be pretty dumb at times, but they're not quite dumb enough to think Xbox Ally has a chance in hell of competing with Switch 2.

Sure they thought, they thought it would be so easy to just make a more expensive, better spec handheld and have all the core gamers just jumping through the roofs to get Xbox ROG over the ''inferior Switch 2'', what they don't realize is that core gamers are so niche and the reason why their consoles fail all the time. Better to go for the mass market, which Nintendo even during the days of Iwata realized when they like Microsoft launched a flopping console that catered to core gamers (OG Xbox and Gamecube).

I really doubt their sales expectations are very high for a $1000 handheld, especially compared to the Switch 2. 

By pricing it at a premium MS are clearly positioning the Ally as a niche enthusiast device, I very much doubt they have any illusions of it taking on Switch 2. 

MS support for Switch 2 will likely pick up next year; apparently Nintendo have been late in distributing devkits, preventing a lot of devs from having stuff ready this year.

The hardware is actually irrelevant for Microsoft.

The entire POINT of the Asus Rog Xbox Ally X is for Microsoft to have a launch-pad for a handheld optimized operating system to stem-the-tide of SteamOS encroaching on Windows as a viable gaming platform... Which is why this will be enabled for all PC handhelds in the future.

It's war of operating systems for Microsoft, Microsoft's bread and butter... They already lost to Android, they don't want history repeating itself.