As someone that needed their first deck RMA'd that fuckin rules. I was PISSED mine died, still have no clue what happened never had a device catastrophically fail like that, but they were awesome about it. Tech support tried to diagnose and fix and when it was obvious it was toast they just took it back and sent me a new one.
I, for one, would actually be fine with buying a Steam Deck at that price just so that way Steam/Valve have incentive to continue their work on Proton (their answer to try and get unsupported games working on Linux and their own official SteamOS).
The trade-off of giving them incentive to work on Proton, which would help an estimated roughly 2.5 million "monthly active users" using Steam on Linux definitely seems reasonable to me at least.
Yeah but I don't want a laptop. Until people start making handhelds this good at that price (and there are competitors getting close) then the price seems fine.