Steam Machine has been awesome for me as a TV PC and couch gaming machine. Cloud gaming is anti-consumer and being able to get away from subscription-based nonsense would be a serious advantage if you do choose to buy it. Owning your own hardware puts you in control, not NVIDIA. SteamOS is great but the Steam Machine is just a PC at the end of the day, you can put SteamOS on another PC and you can install other OSes on the Steam Machine. I have my Machine triple booting SteamOS, Arch, and Windows.