It really doesn’t. They include both anyway, there’s no reason they can’t do it as a separate download. Rainbow 6 Siege did it back in 2015 with their ultra high definition textures pack which is a 30gb download for a game that’s 60gb without it. Lots of players have no use for the ridiculously high-definition textures, it would definitely make sense to separate them from the main package and cut possibly several hours or even days of download time for some people.
I wouldn’t say I’m thrilled, I still use my PC a lot more. I’d say the dual touchpads are probably the best feature for the form factor. And I think the power management features are great, but that’s just software, and I think the other platforms should implement similar systems.
All of those are visually worse than rendering at native resolution though.
I think battery life is an important factor since these are high-drain portable devices. Any additional battery life you can squeeze out of it is a big plus.
I feel like the Deck’s 800p screen is plenty for the size, and it helps it perform better. But maybe that’s just my boomer eyes that can’t tell the difference. Though a bigger screen would have been amazing.
The Deck’s power management features are a solid selling point. There’s no reason they couldn’t be implemented elsewhere, and it would be a boon for other portable devices for sure.
I haven’t used the Ally, but the Deck’s touchpads are just intuitive and functional, it seems so obvious in hindsight that it’s actually shocking that nobody had thought to put them on a portable until now. They work great for replacing a mouse in mouse-focused games, and for navigating desktop mode. Much more effective than navigating with a joystick.
The Steam Deck is sold specifically as a gaming handheld. If you’re buying it to read PDFs, you’re buying the wrong device. Besides, the resolution isn’t the issue for reading documents, it’s the size of the screen. If you want to do non-gaming things, you’ll be much better served if you plug in a monitor, in which case you can even use a 4K display if that’s what you want.
I think the SD does have its issues, but I feel like the display is not one of them. At that size, it’s a good resolution to get better performance in games. A higher resolution would kill the battery, reduce performance, and due to its size it would be hard to tell the difference in-game.