its not about irrelevant, its about changing mindsets and acceptance. If Steam can work out of statically compiled binaries, why not use it throughout ? (that's not a question, but a thought) Multimonitor support is VERY,VERY important for a gaming application. So is HDMI. Some games autoscale when they detect a HDMI connection - will you particular distro be able to do that ? If not, then I will switch to a distro that will.

The point is that there is nothing implicitly wrong with Linux as a technology - there is something lacking in individual distros who seem more fixated on IM frameworks than networking/sound/audio/peripherals. For Steam, these are paramount - and this will influence distros.

Doesn't ALSA have some pretty big limitations?

ALSA as the only thing running on your system does. But if your game supports ALSA then it can plug into ALSA which plugs into PulseAudio and you still get all the benefits of PulseAudio.

I always uninstall pulseaudio as the first thing I do on my Linux box.

I have always noticed a latency between the time that a sound is supposed to be played and when it is actually played with pulse. This doesn't matter so much when listening to an MP3 or whatever but if you are trying to use a sequencer or play a game it becomes a deal breaker.

What are the benefits of PulseAudio other than making your sound system buggy and increasing audio latency?

You can connect to a remote audio server. I've used this feature to output sound from my laptop through my desk speakers even when my laptop is unplugged from its docking station.

Individual volume control for each app. That's why I use PulseAudio despite its problems.

dmix?