>Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room?
>If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though - we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input.
The third announcement will be the controller Valve patented some time ago. This controller replaces a thumbstick with a trackball, and might let you swap out input devices for different games. Regardless, it'll be painless to set up with SteamOS.
That sounds like a special hell. What would even be the point? Making it marginally easier to control products that were never properly re-designed as living room software at the expense of compatibility with essentially every piece of contemporary living room software?
Here's to hoping that if such a thing is actually rolled out, it falls under "an option" and isn't an approach they put too much emphasis on.
A trackball, on the other hand...
And on top of that, occupy some 'third' control scheme somewhere between "kb/m" and "gamepad" that developers would have to explicitly target, at a time when so few of them even put the time into adding proper kb/m support for their console-first-PC-port-maybe-if-its-cheap-to-farm-out titles.
Not sure just how sturdy the thing will be, all this talk about separate components being stuck together by the user sounds kinda fragile. But if it is, you will be able to configure your pad just the way you want.