I love the Steam Deck because it feels like a consumer electronics device: it has the reliability of Linux but not the sweat. The Steam Deck is the only device I've seen that works 100% perfectly with Airpods, for instance, including Apple devices.
I was at Best Buy the other day and saw an ASUS device that looked pretty cool until I picked it up and saw a Windows desktop with fonts not scaled appropriately for the size of the device. Like, wazzup? Steam Big Picture turns my big Windows machine at home into a game console and does the same for my Mac Mini. How is it you can have the back of frickin' Microsoft and not be able to do the same?
Not to say that Steam isn't packed with features that are valuable to many gamers, but just having a great selection of games that "just work" and knowing I can enjoy my investment on the devices I have now and devices I get in the future is worth a lot.
For example, I used the example of remote play together, which is very neat and a lot of people love it, but I personally don't use it.
On the other hand, I make extensive use of Steam's gifting feature, including its ability to handle multiple gifts to multiple people in a single transaction, and to schedule exactly when those gifts will land. And this is something that the other major stores don't seem to support at all, a big advantage for Steam for me, but I'm sure there's many people who don't care at all about gifting.
As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is. Windows is back to sucking again, this time so hard that I'm seriously considering learning Linux and/or switching to macOS on my home system, & playing games on SteamOS instead. I almost never use Microsoft Office anymore, outside of household budgeting spreadsheets that I could easily work with LibreOffice instead.
I expect Azure is in second place because Windows-only shops use it because of the Official Microsoft Active Directory integration (which might be called Entra now?).
For basic "Create a VM, attach disks and networking, and use it as a computer." tasks, it is my professional experience that Azure is the worst of the Big Three US "cloud" providers by far. Their "control plane" is flaky and unreliable, so it's something that you'll probably only notice if you create, destroy, or modify VMs a lot. [0]
If you have a support contract, Azure makes it much easier to talk to a human than GCP does, but I never encountered an issue that they were able to solve. "File a ticket, but don't expect support to be able to help because they won't understand the problem, and it will eventually go away." was the lesson I eventually learned.
[0] And the word on the street is that a huge chunk of Github's reliability problems are caused because of the move from AWS to Azure. Having used all three pretty extensively, I believe the rumors.
Oh weird, mine have always made weird clicks and dropped audio here and there and shit like that when using them with my Deck.
They don’t do that when I use them with my Franken-PC bazzite machine. Instead, that one disconnects my BT mouse a couple times an hour and sometimes seems to stop processing BT keyboard input and “queue up” my presses instead, to be processed at random intervals over the next minute or so. Both of which are fun when playing games.
Well it turned mine into a 2000s linux/wine debugfest flashback when I wanted to play GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony... Also don't get me started on having to keep the poweroff button pushed on the xbox controller for mouse emulation for games not having controller support in the menus. It is far from the polished experience you had, but possibly I just held it wrong.
They really should make a choice between xbox as separate platform and xbox as windows pc. I has been like 10 years where they were kept advertising it as some kind of single ecosystem, while it was not
But the purchasing experience is top notch and they even have a generous refund policy. It's just lightyears ahead of the competition.
The biggest problem however is network effects. Most people simply don't want to juggle multiple stores and the communities attached to them.
People would likely juggle the use of two stores if the value proposition was great enough. But it isn't, which is why Steam dominates and all their competitors operate in comparatively tiny fiefdoms.
Microsoft killed it