As things stand, the ROG Ally is one of the best handheld gaming PCs, the Steam Deck aside, particularly if you are after a portable powerhouse that is rocking Windows 11
Literally no one is looking for that. Some people might think they are, but they are misinformed.
The fact that the Deck doesn't run Windows is a selling point. Sounds like higher management here needs to at least pretend to understand their product.
I actually run W11 on my SteamDeck, and would not recommend it for most users and definitely not for anyone to use for console. The biggest “killer-feature” all of these handhelds are missing is the ability to sleep like SteamOS allows and every other portable console for last two decades. It honestly makes these devices like the Ally with all their greatly improved specs look like cheap knockoffs since they can’t sleep, which could be a huge problem when using on the go.
Microsoft is looking for it and it wouldn't surprise me if they are paying a decent penny for it to try to stop the Linux gaming momentum the deck is driving.
It's entirely irrelevant to me. I don't care what the specs are if it's just running Windows.
They will try, and they will miss the mark and make an iffy experience even if the specs are good. I've heard the current one is definitely better than the others only in ease of taking apart and putting back together.
Until someone can come up with a better kb/m alternative for desktop mode nobody is beating the deck. Even the current deck solution has room for improvements. If you could edit the layout I could probably reach 80% of my qwerty speed using 'isolinear' colemak on the deck pads. Definitely can't touch my real keyboard speeds on that layout though.
This is just a random image from search but basically in a grid like this rather than Remington typewriter key positions. It's a lot easier to use blind IMO and less hand cramp-y. I could never type with 'proper' or consistent hand and finger position until I switched. I also used shift weirdly.
I find that very unlikely actually. What SoC would it run? AMD hasn't released anything stronger than the Z1 Extreme (which is just a power constrained laptop part) so the only alternative would be a variation on that, maybe one that works better under a tight power budget just like the AMD chip in the Steam Deck? However I'd argue, as a ROG Ally owner, that battery life improvements aren't really that high on my wish list. If I could get anything it would be optimizations making the experience more stable and improve 1% lows. But most of that I don't think is even on Asus, it's more on AMD to tweak their drivers and on the game makers to tweak for the Z1 Extreme, which thankfully is in more than just the ROG Ally so it does make sense to do so.