not much to abuse

Then I’m misunderstanding this part. The PS3 compute cluster incident commented below is what came to mind.

But in the current climate I image that if the Steam machine was heavily subsidized that there would be a subset of people abusing that by doing something like purchasing, harvesting, and immediately reselling its parts.

Huh – what do you think I said or why I said it?

Consoles make an attempt to be a locked ecosystem - which is why they can subsidize it - because they know if you buy it your buying their games for it.

Duh - people are shitty and would abuse it.

What are they gonna do – buy Twitter again?

Is no fruit sacred to tech nerds