The trade off is that the hundreds of games that I previously bought can be played, there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores, and any games I buy in the future won’t be lost to the collapse of a single service, since I can just reinstall them on any other PC (cloud or not). Personally, that’s worth the minor inconvenience of an update screen. And, this is an implementation detail. Shadow could easily provide scheduled updates for Windows, and Steam/whatever popular store games.

> manually logging in

You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).

> You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.

> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores

As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.

I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.

> you want to play games with.

Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.