Windows on a handheld is just bad. It’s that simple. A Steam Deck competitor needs a handheld friendly controller focused interface that is at least as good as Valve’s. Our just straight up ship with Steam OS and use Valve’s.
SteamOS still has many instances of awkward UX and some frankly broken behavior, especially while trying to use community features, it’s just that every other offering has been worse.
It’s heavily rumored that Microsoft is working on their own handheld, and it will be interesting to see how that shakes up the market. If microsoft just makes windows controller/handheld friendly, it will greatly improve all the windows handhelds.
However I strongly suspect that we’ll instead see the microsoft handheld be locked down, only able to run microsoft store games. It’ll still probably do better than all the other non-deck handhelds that way, but won’t really be a handheld “PC” if locked down that way.
Third possibility is that Microsoft might do both, release and locked down handheld and release some lesser improvements for navigating windows with a controller. This outcome would make sense if they have different teams working on both at the same time.
If microsoft would release a gaming handheld, it would probably be locked down like the xbox console.
Short Answer: it’s complicated, but yes
