Morrowind is the best. Oblivion remaster is better than skyrim (in my Morrowboomer opinion) and that was just refreshing a 20 year old game. I feel like there is a lot of hype for TES6 that it may not live up to, but surpassing skyrim is definitely doable.
I have a Lenovo 2 in 1 tablet laptop and it works OK. I am running Debian with KDE Plasma and it has been a little flaky with the automatic screen rotation and sometimes i have to toggle it on and off to get it to kick in but that’s it. Not sure if that’s something that would be fixed on different distros or DEs.
I didn’t have to do any extra 3rd party driver setup or anything like that.
The touch screen itself works great. I have used tablet mode mostly for reading RPG source books that I only have PDFs of. Works great for that.
The track pads are phenomenal for any game that doesn’t have great built in controller support. I use them for mouse input on games like FTL, and they are much more accurate for aiming in FPS games than emulating a mouse on a stick. I also use them as radial menus for expanded controls on games like Elite Dangerous that really need more buttons than a controller has.
I agree with your point in general, and SteamOS was the main thing that pushed me towards steam deck over other handhelds with better specs. Now that I’ve used it though, it would be hard to give up the trackpads if the other options dont have the same quality. My hope is that 3rd party devices will basically mirror the steam controller setup, since the SteamOS controller mapping and provided layouts are a huge part of why so many games work on the platform even without official controller support. It’s not just the hardware or the software but how well they work together.