Making it even cheaper for the rest of the world!
All this winning for the people in the US of A…
…are they tired of it already?

Aaaaah, you’re going for the second million.
I understand.

Skip avocado toast.
Haven’t they told you?

Funny how chinese (car) maufacturers start appearing as “the good ones”, because I can’t see them starting to bend over backwards to make Google happy by locking devices out that don’t carry the appropriate signature.

It can go higher than the 8 watts, though.
The 8 watts are with rather low CPU load, but with 1 SATA SSD and 1 NVMe SSD.
At full CPU load I expect it to be closer to 15 watts. With what the device is runningn high load happens rarely and not for long.

As others mentioned used SFF PCs, here’s my recommendation based on my own experience.

I bought several used Dell Wyse 5070. The 5070 was announced in May 2018 and used as thin client.
They’re tiny, silent (no fan) and you can fit a NVMe SSD via adapter (PCIe A/E key -> M key) in the WiFi card slot next to a SATA SSD. I picked the ones with Intel Celeron J4105 (Quad Core) with 1.5GHz, up to 2.5GHz burst and put 32 GB RAM in one of them (that was before prices went nuts).
Beware, only if you pick the right dual ranked RAM modules (e.g. Patriot PSD416G26662S), you can have a max. of 2x16 GB. To start your journey, 4 or 8 GB might just be enough and don’t cost an arm and a leg.
Now I have a PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) running with several virtual servers and lxc, one 5070 hosts a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) and both devices are far from their limit. In case of hardware failure I have spare 5070s.
Each 5070 cost around $65 and runs at around 8 watts at average. Dunno about current prices though.

It fits my needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Maybe it fits your needs as well?

…as would the users…

It already is. The headline is missing “desktop”.

I’ll be damned if that is no prime number of cars sold!

You should worry about all personal data/accounts.
I worry about credentials saved in Firefox, Thunderbird, Nextcloud and my Steam account.

Spot-on!
That’s what I have (gaming and working unified) both at my Steam Deck running SteamOS (with profile encryption) and my laptop running Bazzite (with FDE).
My DeskMeet is off most of the time, although it has the most beefy GPU (sporting a PowerColor Radeon RX 9060 XT, which I just managed to fit in the case) - yet it also has the highest power consumption and I rarely need that power for the games I play most often. Btw. it runs Bazzite with FDE 😉

Like @Railcar8095@lemmy.world already explained, having some strong protection of data on a device like the Steam Deck, that can easily be lost/stolen seems to be warranted.

Aside from the saved login credentials of my Steam account, there are a lot more credentials saved on it, because I love to use the desktop mode as work environment.
Having someone getting access to several accounts saved in the browser or email client would be not very great to say the least.

I basically have one (based on DeskMeet X300), although it runs on Bazzite.
Dunno if SteamOS would’ve worked back when I set it up.

I preferred Bazzite, because it provides full disk encryption out of the box whereas there’s only a kind of workaround for encrypting the user profile on SteamOS - unless you want to risk breaking all by SteamOS updates.

With current prices building 3rd party Steam Machines is about as appealing as it is for Steam releasing Steam Machines.
I would’t have that “Steam Machine” if it weren’t for repurposing the DeskMeet X300 that I already had and which I no longer needed for its formerly intended purpose (it was in the end a waste running the Proxmox Virtual Environment there and I moved the PVE to a Dell Wyse 5070).
Well, that’s gone quite off-topic. What I wanted to say was simple:

current hardware prices are such a pain in the ass and make building Steam Machine no fun!

Clonezilla should suffice for cloning the SSD.
A docking station (like this) with included m.2 slot for the Steam Deck should do the trick to have both SSDs attached to the Steam Deck - if you plan on having a docking station for your Steam Deck anyway, that is.
Without such a docking station you need an adapter (or even two) for the SSD(s).
Easiest way would be to swap the SSDs and install SteamOS anew.

I upgraded mine with a Corsair MP600 Mini 2 TB back when that didn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Per GB SD cards aren’t a lot cheaper, but typically are slower and have worse durability than SSDs.
I do have an SD card in my Steam Deck, but only use it for my gog.com library. It makes moving that library between my Steam Deck and my laptop easy. On that SD card are only smallish games.
I wouldn’t want to run Cyberpunk 2077 from an SD card.

I wholeheartedly agree!
I installed Bazzite because I wanted an easy solution for my laptop with Nvidia GPU - now it’s my daily driver and gaming is only a fraction of its job.

Wouldn’t an AMD RX 9060 XT with 16 GB RAM be nice as well if you’re hunting for good speed/cost options?

10a is supported, but flagged experimental:
https://grapheneos.org/releases

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AMD and Intel offer quite nice GPUs.
I recently purchased a Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16 GB RAM. It does the job.

I can relate. I installed Bazzite, because I wanted a solution which works with my Nvidia GPU out of the box.
Now it’s my daily driver.