Steam deck has made it from “niche pre order thing for enthusiasts” to “niche thing I can buy whenever I want”, which is a great step.
It’s probably the most successful hardware venture from Valve since they tried to make Steam Machines back in 2014. Hopefully they keep up the momentum.
As for the "homework" you mentioned valve should've done, they did it. They've mentioned that they'll work with game studios of all sizes to help them make their games compatible on launch with the steam deck, both in technical terms (proton on Linux) and in usability (ui on a small screen).
I don't want to dox myself over this, but the Verge review for the steam deck is starts with "it's not ready". The Verge review for our product starts with how easy it was to setup and how impressed they were with the UI (which has to deal with constrained input just like the Deck)
While they're not direct competitors, I leave you to guess which is more approachable to the average user.
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Valve clearly did not put in nearly as much effort into the polish of the frontend software as they did with the hardware and lower level stuff.
Hardware wise the thing is a marvel, and Proton is an engineering marvel... but then a top post on the subreddit is complaining that they can't even get the back button right for the store.
It's things like that which separate a tech toy from a console.
Working with game studios is one thing, having massive widespread appeal so they feel compelled to take you up on it is another.
I thought, maybe Valve was going to make that kind of play, but almost immediately after getting mine I realized Valve was not thinking that big (or if they were, their actions don't sell it).
I was actually going to write an article on how not to do onboarding, using the Deck as an example, but enough time has passed I forgot most of the learnings, but I would summarize my experience with the Deck as "Very smart people worked on all the fun, exciting, challenging parts of making a new product... and rushed through the boring parts like a kid doing homework in their least favorite subject".
One example off the top of my head: login. I worked on a greenfield consumer hardware project with a similar rich UI, and before we had our SoC finalized (COVID made that fun), we were already protoyping "boring" things like signing in with your existing device and a code, because we _knew_ that those first few minutes are unbelievably important for how people view your product. Making them type in a long secure password is a great way to ruin their excitement.
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There's a bunch of (very visible) polish things that are 100% excusable for the Deck, and I still enjoy it... but just don't show Valve having anyone having driven this thing as "we want to be the new console platform".
And to be clear I'm not passing judgement on that either: the Steam Deck essentially turning Valve into a PC manufacturer putting out one of the coolest "PCs" for an extremely good price is not terrible. And I totally understand the value of it being "just another PC", it turns out being a PC gives you a lot of value when it comes to having a gaming library!
But I can't help but dream of what could have been. A world where the Steam Deck really came correct as its own platform. A smattering of games have thrown carrots to the Steam Deck, like C2077 adding quality presets and the like, but I'm imagining mainstream games not being considered shipped without extensive testing and optimization specifically for the Steam Deck just like an independent console. Gameplay features being designed specifically for the unique form factor and having that be a selling point for the "Steam Deck edition"
I also think it would have put some good pressure on the incumbents when it comes to the "console manufacturer - publisher" relationship, since Valve has proven that they're much more reasonable to deal with (Greenlight launched at a time when companies like Nintendo were still forcing you to sign an NDA just to see how much a dev-kit cost, before you'd even dream of launching a game for their console)