It's baffling especially because all of the other handhelds ship with a desktop operating system by default.

I don't care that much gameplay wise. I don't play much without a controller.

Windows even with the trackpad is brutal, though. Without? Oof.

games like Against the Storm, Anno, Civilization, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Homeworld, Northgard, OpenTTD, Stellaris, etc

Note that none of those games are "Steam Deck Verified". They are at most "Playable", and often the controls is not the only issue Valve warns about (many also have small text that's hard to read). So playing them, while technically possible, is not really that great of an experience.

The issue is that not everyone wants to fiddle with controller settings, and sadly there's very few games that do take advantage of the trackpad and actually have proper first-class support for the Deck, with seamless idiot-proof integration.

And I say that despite being a Steam Controller owner (and I'd love a SC 2). The experience with "Verified" titles is much more seamless than having to check your controller mappings to understand what you need to press (or having convoluted layers / combinations for the more keyboard heavy ones... like say, ToME).

It's a bit sad that the trackpad is not getting much love from game devs. I'd have hoped that at least some games started allowing simultaneous input for gamepad and mouse, just so that they can earn a "Verified" badge. But that's still a problem, though some engines handle it better than others.

Something similar occurred with the Steam Controller, which I loved. I'd show it to people, and they'd be like "OnLy OnE aNaLoG sTiCk, WhAt ThE hEcK?" and completely miss the point of the trackpads.

I can play strategy games with a freaking controller from the couch. That was always the appeal. You aren't gonna be able to do that with a DualSense.

Also, the virtual trackball haptic on the Deck was developed for the Steam Controller. It's surprisingly intuitive feeling.