This article does a good job of talking about how poor the windows experience on a handheld is, and why SteamOS could dominate handheld devices if windows doesn’t start to make serious changes to improve it’s useability and performance.
To be clear, I don’t want to see windows succeed here, I would absolutely love to see SteamOS take over the handheld space and be a real linux ambassador to show people that they do have other choices than windows for their computers.
That’s actually brilliant, and if they offered a stripped down base system that end-users could customize downstream (vis a vis BlueBuild and Universal Blue), they could reclaim some of the market.
But they’d have to relinquish some of their control and that precious user telemetry, so I’m with you that it’s obviously how they want it.
MS seems to be more of a user data and subscription company now.