Not to mention you can just toss a 1tb SD card in, with no skills needed and only minimal cost difference.
Yes, accessing your data off an SD card is marginally slower than off an NVME ssd.... but we're talking, iirc, milliseconds. If it really bugs you later down the line, then you can upgrade the SSD.
Found some benchmarks. Load times appear to be influenced by the CPU doing decompression. It's not the SD being as fast as a SSD, but rather the SSD being as slow as a SD because of this. That's... interesting.
Yep. At some point maybe Valve will change that, but for now, it's a great way to get a steam deck. And even if they do change/fix that later, you're not really missing out on anything- everything will be the same speed it always was for you.
I've been told (haven't done it myself) that the ps5 controller pairs extremely well with the steam deck + dock. I would ask around though- I have an actual Steam Controller that I use, myself, but I don't think you can buy those anymore.
Well, sometimes load times matter. In Borderlands 3 going off SD card instead of disc drive caused a minute or more of loading time when launching the game.
That's not the cause- benchmarks have been done on the matter, as you can see slightly down the comment chain. You've simply attributed the slow load times to what you think is the issue.