Price to performance and just outright price aren’t really the same thing. And isn’t a base deck like $300? I could be wrong, I sort of assumed building a PC and buying your peripherals was more expensive 🤷♂️. I mentioned to OP it might be a lot more comparable if you just aim for roughly the same specs as the deck using used last-gen parts, since super impressive specs didn’t seem important to them.
And yes, I just mean that it’s cheaper to replace just one component when you need to than buy the whole thing over again. Its also way less e-waste. To me, upgrading not being necessary seems like a very odd point to make- if you never upgrade at a certain you won’t be able to play anything newer. Which maybe doesn’t matter to op, but that seems like an odd assumption to make. Even if you just use a computer for less demanding productivity tasks, its specs will eventually start to struggle…
It just seems like most of the benefits of the deck seem like things that either aren’t as important to them (handheld functionality) or are short term benefits (no need to build anything, potentially cheaper upfront), where the PC seems like it makes more sense longer term, given they don’t especially care about having a handheld specially.