When Valve introduced its Steam Machine cube gaming console/PC, the gaming community began questioning the hardware choices and Valve's performance claims. However, a Valve engineer stated that the Steam Machine is more powerful than 70% of gaming PCs on the market, based on Steam Survey data. It fe...
It needs to be cheap.
However, when comparing to the power of locked up device such as ps5, it never hurts reminds that the supposed GPU processing power of a ps5 doesn’t come for free… even if you’ve fully paid your console. Aside for demos or jailbreaked devices (piracy on console) the only way to run graphics at full potential on the locked ps5 is paying full AAA (which now is settling around 80$/€) for EACH product. There are alternatives in the spending (ie: the Netflix alike from Sony’s store)… but those are only options that Sony allow you to (you can’t run weekly free games from EGS, itch.io… or even web browser games!).
Whatever power you pay for any generic PC potentially cover you in any way: you can play arcade vector games as Asteroid at 4k (or even teorical 32K when the hardware will exists).
The difference Valve could make is showing the topical console gamer customer an easy to use access to it: once they’ll see the light… things may go different also for console-only customers (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wouldn’t want to lose more customers to Valve’s better deal)