The fact they are making changes to windows and partnering with Asus on releasing Xbox hardware in the same space is more than enough evidence, but also, the steam deck is a tiny part of the market(it might be the best but it is still tiny).
I do wonder how this works for offline play which is fairly common for handheld PCs. Does Game Pass work offline?
I don’t think it will simply because the way game pass is implemented is via the MS Store version of those games. Using Steam would likely require them to switch to the Steam version of games and might not be that straightforward? Who knows.
If I plan to play the game long term and potentially play it on my Deck. The only reason I have Game Pass is for CoD because the player base for that game dies in less than a year when a new one is about to come out.
Isn’t there some form of sampling bias here though? The kind of people who generally would care about these things likely also care about interoperability and would be on Android. I wouldn’t be surprised if iPhone users simply don’t care if Apple demands them to do anything.