Technically true, though you can start a free trial of Prime and claim all the games, and then (supposedly) they’re still yours to keep after the trial expires. A small hoop to jump through, but it should mean free games!
This is the first one of these steam deck competitors that actually looks like it’s taken notes on the competition: trackpad like a deck, joycons like a switch, back buttons, a kickstand; much more interesting than one of the ones that looks like they’ve just stuck a screen on an xbox controller. The deck’s big feature is its software though and this runs windows, so they better have a good plan for how to make it performant without costing the world!
This is not true though, it’s a full PC which you can install whatever you want on, which just happens to have a very convenient way to run most steam games on
You don’t need to buy a state of the art PC though. You can play most indies on a ten year old laptop, and you can build a good enough PC for the same price as a console and all its peripherals. The real savings are in the software though, you don’t need to pay full whack for games when you have steam sales, free giveaways, and the ability to play anything that anyone has made for the last few decades!
I’m fully well aware of the benefits of PC gaming (I’ve not bought a console for a decade and I run a community for free PC game giveaways!), but you can’t really get mad at a console company releasing a new version. The point of a console is to be a fixed, known piece of hardware that children can use without needing to tinker with settings, and obviously they’re going to want to up the version of things every few years as technology progresses!