Well, I've never owned a Steamdeck, so I guess ignorance is bliss in this case; I don't know what I'm missing. I really try to find games that work best with a controller to play on my Ally. There are plenty of games that require a keyboard and mouse, and I'll either use my desktop or dock my Ally, but again, I got it for the controller games.

I never used the trackpad in NMS on the steam deck. Never even thought about it. I've generally found the SD trackpad too fiddly for mouse games and I usually get tired of playing them pretty quickly.

The trackpad are much more useful in desktop mode on the Steam Deck, and that's where I really feel them missing on the Ally. It's actually really tough, because the Ally is an amazing PC. Just as a straight up windows PC, it is incredibly fast, quiet, and has 4k120 output. It is better than any laptop I've ever owned. It runs Cinebench multicore at nearly 6x the speed as my Surface Book 2. Single core performance is comparable to my desktop with a 5900X. If it had a damn trackpad I would make it my only computer. As it is I'll probably return it because the steam deck is more pleasant to use as a handheld gaming machine.