I do wish I could go mac only - my desk would definitely look tidier. But I don’t see it happening soon.
It is kind of annoying you can't game on Macs, however thats just how things are. Cars handle better than Trucks, and Trucks can haul more than cars. There is a lot of overlap in what they can do, but ultimately they have different specialties.
That said, my experience with Microsoft from a long time *nix users has been pretty horrible. I do think a lot of this is Microsoft, but a lot of it is going from being a poweruser to being a total novice is quite annoying.
It is too underpowered to do much gaming at 1080p (let alone 4k) except older games, but handles its native ~720p pretty well. You have to go into desktop mode to get higher res than that (on an external monitor), but you'll only want to do that for games that are both older (so that it can run them at tolerable frame rates at 1080p) and that really need the extra pixels, anyway. The Proton stuff works quite well, most things that run well on modern Windows in widescreen without a bunch of hand-ini-editing config tweaks or whatever work fine on the Steam Deck without much pain.
Decent option if you catch it on sale. Depends on what you play, though. Some folks find its mouse emulation touchpad thingy decent, but I found it a fun-killing chore for any kind of pointy-clicky-draggy games (Paradox, various tactical war games). But, you can play those games docked with keyboard & mouse and they're ok.
It's a hell of an emulation system for older console games....
The final justification for a physical windows desktop was to play games, but I haven't touched a single title in months. Gaming feels like something I am completely over at this point.
My ideal tech stack at home is starting to look like one MacBook as you say. All the windows stuff I do for work is on a Windows365 desktop in the cloud. I've got a region within 10 milliseconds of my home office and it's been working out great so far.
Will probably get rid of these boxes before next year rolls around.
Which is why releasing games for Mac users has less sense, than Windows or Linux. You're probably in the category of a casual gamer, which is served well by mobile games.
Could you elaborate on this more? What do you mean? What makes you a big Microsoft guy? I mainly ask because everything else you said seems contradictory of that so I'm curious your definition