Before we put the main hardware under the knife, let's take a quick look at the side dishes.

Is this the future of the gamepad vs. keyboard-and-mouse debate? Valve seems to have wrapped a keyboard and mouse around a controller.

Individually configurable touchpads and loads of buttons make this a sort of hybrid of everyone's favorite input devices.

Valve is encouraging developers and tinkerers to experiment with its operating system, and as such has thoughtfully provided a contingency plan: a USB recovery drive.

According to Valve: "SteamOS Beta ships with our Steam Client program, which... serves as a user interface and provides connectivity to our Steam online services. That being said, you can still access standard Linux desktop."