Not to be confused with the community-loved but hated-by-nintendo mod of smash brawl, Project M: https://pmunofficial.com/
It's not remotely possible for Steam Deck to have the sort of first-party integration Nintendo accomplishes around co-op games, multiple controllers in multiple configurations, motion controls, pairing, latency, suspend/resume...
Like, have you used a Valve product before? They're beautiful and inspiring but... when they work, it's still not Nintendo quality.
The vast, vast majority of Nintendo customers know nothing of game mods or competitive multiplayer or care about latency or netcode. I doubt the majority even play Smash or any fighting game.
Always surprises me just how out of touch this company is. Just finished reading that huge Twitter thread. That's just so sad.
Intellectual property shouldn't even exist in the first place, let alone be used to extort $50k from fans who are basically advertising their game for free, making it popular and driving a lot of sales. They're the ones who owe Nintendo nothing, yet they remained loyal despite this mistreatment.
So for all other meanings IP does not exist indeed, and this is a misleading term. But instead on arguing on these details, it seems more productive to point that there is an already existing alternative that is better for everybody.