The steam streaming is perfectly acceptable if you use it for it's intended purpose: streaming games to 1-2 close friends rather than 1000s of faceless "nobodies". It requires absolutely no configuration on the streamer side. Two clicks and you're live!

Without SteamOS and Steam Machines we wouldn't have 3100 games with linux compatibility on steam so I would consider that a moderate success. For the remaining unsupported games using the windows steam client via wine works reasonably well because the client installs the missing libraries automatically.

But you're right they are certainly lacking in focus.