Yeah, this reminds of the initial launch of Steam back in 2003. At first it seemed like an annoying hoop to jump through. As the years went by and it got more dependable, more games, and more features, it became easier and easier to forget how annoying it was in the beginning.
I wonder if the same thing will happen with SteamOS. At best it will initially seem like a novelty, then 10 years from now a huge group of customers will have forgotten what it was like to never have had it.
For home users, yes. But in the business world, it's the Microsoft Office Suite, especially Outlook + Exchange. Sure, MS Office has been ported to OSX, but it's more expensive to go with Apple Hardware than commodity PC + MS Windows.
If Microsoft flipped their lid and ported Office to run on common Linux distributions (Debian/Fedora), you'd see a lot more corporations switching.
Microsoft does have their Office365.com, which is a web-based version of Office. I haven't tried it myself, but from what I've heard, a lot of its advanced features rely on Silverlight and using browsers other than IE on Linux or Mac OSX puts you in a sort of basic mode. The advanced mode is very comparable to running the desktop version while the basic mode is akin to the Google Docs editor.
I wonder if the same thing will happen with SteamOS. At best it will initially seem like a novelty, then 10 years from now a huge group of customers will have forgotten what it was like to never have had it.