I have a Steam Deck, and while it's playable, I'm not going to be setting any speed records with it. It's really kind of painfully difficult to things that I have down to muscle memory on a keyboard. Just as an example, copying recipes from one assembler to 20 more takes me 1-2s on keyboard. On the Deck the default controller layout doesn't even allow for doing it once. Early game tricks like holding z and using your mouse to drop individual pieces of coal across all of your miners and smelters in a row isn't a thing as far as I can work out. In fact I essentially had to fully load all my smelters rather than distribute it because I couldn't figure out how to split stacks.

I'm sure a lot of this is familiarity, and if I force myself I will get more efficient with the Steam Deck, but I doubt I'd ever find it superior or even equivalent to keyboard and mouse.