Most of the announced machines mentioned "late 2014" as their release date. That gives Valve the better part of the year to polish the OS and for publishers/developers to keep porting games.

But _today_ you can run SteamOS on a relatively inexpensive NUC or used PC as a streaming client and that's probably the kind of early adopter that Valve is looking for for now.

But yeah, the Digital Storm $2,000+ Steam Machine makes no sense to me, considering there's only one game for Linux (Metro Last Light) that would even come close to stressing the hardware.

That's what bugs me so much about Steam Machines. When Valve originally announced it, there were no hardware partners announced yet, and they said they'd have three basic tiers -- a $99 or under "good" that presumably did nothing but in-home streaming, a console-priced "better," and then the "best" tier, where manufacturers could ship whatever. They announce the OEM partners and what's being built, and EVERY machine comes up in the best tier. So the idea of leveraging a $99 machine to do for Steam what Roku or Chromecast does for video streaming was put out there by Valve, and then they've completely failed to deliver on it in hardware. They're still hard at work at in-home streaming, but none of the actual Steam Machines announced seem to be built for it; you don't need most of those machines to stream Bioshock Infinite off the gaming PC you already own.