This one was obvious at least 1 year ago if not more

Its a literary of little things that kept adding up for valve to make a move in this direction.

The big ones for me have been the fact that valve has been hiring hardware, dsp, fpga, linux developers, kernel hackers, control chain specialists and such forth for the last 2-3 years.

I remember saying a long time back that valve are either going to push onto some android hybrid thing, or that there were making a console.

I think the Linux thing was valve reacting to windows 8 that forced them to show their hand a little.