With the success of the steamdeck and potential success of the ASUS Ally, should Microsoft just make there own handheld that just runs windows instead of Armory crate malware? They could run smaller games natively and stream bigger stuff.
Like with most things, I think it's a complicated mix of hardware and software. Valve kinda has a leg up here because they're in control of the entire experience. The OS is something they've forked and built specifically for use on that device, so they can craft a lot of it around the sorts of inputs available on that thing. You only see a desktop-ass OS on a Steam Deck if you deliberately go looking for one. Once you get there, navigating it is decidedly less smooth, but since they've included a lot of OS-level button shortcuts and stuff that will, say, let you pop out an on-screen keyboard, it's not nearly as bad as it could be.
The Asus thing has none of this harmony. It's regular-ass Windows 11, which has some pretty passable touchscreen support these days, but is not built with a gamepad in mind. It's also not built to easily launch games, and in this case, the games they would probably build around would all come from the Microsoft Store and Xbox app, not Steam or any of the other storefronts you'd actually want to use. So Asus has tried to bridge this gap by forcing an app called Armoury Crate, which is mostly a launcher that pulls in games from multiple storefronts, but it's also the thing that drives the device's gamepad and lets you execute shortcuts on that gamepad to pull up an on-screen keyboard or anything else. Armoury Crate is shitty. But since shutting it prevents you from having any configured gamepad shortcuts (like mapping one of the back buttons to the Xbox/Guide button, which is very useful for Steam Big Picture mode and plenty of other little things), you're more or less stuck with it.
When it comes to this handheld device, there is zero harmony between Windows 11 as an OS, the launchers like Steam or Epic or Battle.net that you need to use to get your games installed, and the Asus-provided software that's meant to bridge it all together. The experience is bad, sloppy, and full of cases that had me digging deep into various Windows menus to configure things properly, where I found the limits of patience when it comes to running Windows 11 with a touch interface. Asus also fucks themselves over by having like two separate pre-installed apps that feel somewhere between bloatware and malware, and you use those to install firmware updates, bios updates, app updates, and so on.
I think Microsoft should devote some real time to crafting a handheld-friendly version of Windows 11, because this is a really fascinating segment of devices that I really think could be around for years to come. However, when you start to think about Microsoft's incentives and how they would probably do something like that, it wouldn't be so that Steam ran more smoothly on the device. It'd be so they could have a really slick Game Pass interface, which... OK, sure, that's welcome... but they'd need to build something that could gracefully handle Steam and, probably, all those other launchers, too.
The Steam Deck, similarly, has room for improvement, but unless you're like me and you're cramming the Battle.net client onto a Steam Deck so that you can run Diablo IV in Linux (and it's fuckin' rad that this thing can do that, by the way), you get a very simple, consolized take on PC gaming. It's neat!
There were some experiments late last year at an internal Microsoft hackathon into a gaming-centric "handheld mode" for Windows, so it's something on the mind of someone over there. Whether or not it ever congeals into something that actually ships into the outside world probably depends more on more mainstream hardware OEMs like Asus experimenting with handheld form factors and demanding better software than anything else.