But that's why I said one person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying that it isn't. There are more resources beyond those. Quick looks, Digital Foundry, SkillUp, Let's Plays...and as you said, games can still have these issues beyond day 1, so at that point not pre-ordering wouldn't have saved you from it either. But two hours is certainly usually enough to find the obvious deal-breakers if the other resources fail you. Cyberpunk 2077 worked pretty damn well for me even right at launch; I didn't pre-order it, but even if I did, I probably would have been able to tell in two hours if it was horrifically broken like all of the video evidence from other players showed it was, in general. I also really enjoyed it, so that's just a difference in taste between you and I.
There are also Steam reviews, reddit forums, etc. One person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying it isn't. I've got Mortal Kombat 1 pre-ordered, and that series has a history of shaky PC ports, with enough cause for me to believe it could happen again. If all's well, I'll know before I finish work for the day from reviews, forums, etc., and I'll get Shang Tsung for no additional cost. If not, I get my money back, and they can earn my money from me some other time.
No other game takes that long to compile shaders, so that could have been a red flag for a refund on its own. And you can pay attention to forums and games press in the meantime to find out when it's in a playable state before you repurchase it. But on launch day, you could have it preloaded and smoke test it with no risk.
Steam muddies this a bit though, since you have two weeks or two hours of playtime to try it out and get your full money back, so it removes a lot of the risk in the first place; in some cases, it removes all of it.
There will be different amounts of friction depending on the customer and what they expect. If all they need is Chrome and like one or two other Electron apps, as long as they're walked through the software center on first boot, quickly. But there will be friction when one odd customer here or there expects program X and it's not available, even if there's a very viable alternative. They'd have to educate their customers through marketing like Apple does to ease that transition, and Apple still only has a single digit percentage of the PC market.
I don't need Slack to do voice calls. I could use something else for it. It's just that the things that Slack is good at, Teams is horrible at, and Teams sucks for calls too. If someone calls me, the pop up that allows me to accept or decline the call should actually be responsive and not crash. When I'm browsing old messages, it should be able to render a simple text history without thinking about it for 30 seconds. When I get a message, the notification should occur every time instead of just when it feels like it. When I lose and regain my VPN connection, it should be able to dynamically reconnect without crashing or hanging on a disconnect message. If you're going to put document integration into Teams, why is there not a tab system for open documents I need to keep open rather than forcing me to use the history on the back button or otherwise reload the document by clicking through to teams->team name->files?
Adobe would be huge, but what would be even bigger is if it came pre-installed on a computer you buy at Walmart or Best Buy. Otherwise, no one's going to want to switch from what they're using unless the thing they're using bothers them. As annoying as I find Windows Updates to be, most people don't seem to notice.
Is the ROG Ally dead in the water? It seems to be gaining some traction. I don't think it's going to overtake the Steam Deck or anything, but it satisfies that customer who wants a little extra power, resolution, and compatibility.
Neither are guaranteed by the seller though. They could change their API tomorrow and break compatibility. Unlikely though that is, if they want my sale, they can do the work themselves rather than relying on an unofficial project with hooks into their store.
I mostly play fighting games, which can be alienating with a large group of friends who don't grind them as much as you do, because then you reach a point where you win every match against them, and they're not having fun. If you go to locals, and I do, you make fighting game friends, which is some kind of solution, though not ideal. Perhaps the 2v2 mode of Project L will help that problem, but I don't trust Riot to make that game work without an internet connection, and online-only games are a deal-breaker for me at this point.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a game a lot of my friends and even my brothers are interested in playing co-op, but I know from experience with Divinity: Original Sin and attempts to co-op long games like Factorio and Starbound that eventually adults' schedules will not align to be able to finish the game you started. For BG3 in particular, I think I'm going to play it solo for the first time, and then I'll try co-op with one of my brothers and maybe a separate game with another friend of mine where I play a character in their worlds; that way I can try different builds and strategies, and if our schedules diverge, they can keep going in their game with the character I was playing.
Unfortunately, most other co-op games are online-only these days, and I think we're going to start seeing a swing back to allowing LAN and split-screen again, not the least of which is Baldur's Gate 3, but it's going to be slow going for a while. FPS games in particular have dried up immensely, at least for the style of game I'm looking for. Competitive FPS games have become live service, second job, battle royale or extraction shooters; and the campaigns, when they happen at all, have become open world checklists. So in the meantime, my favorite co-op games have been session-based games like roguelikes. Things like Vagante, 30XX, Streets of Rogue, and such. The one exception for FPS games is that cross play, split screen, controller support, all that good stuff added to the Quake remasters has myself and a friend of mine eyeing finally playing those games co-op, because we're not going to get anything like it for a long time.