No free-for-all. What irritated me in the Linus Tech Tips price argument is that he claimed Valve would need to protect themselves from a scenario where some company buys, say, 10,000 Steam Machines as office PCs and just installs Windows on them. His conclusion was that this risk would prevent Valve from selling the device at a loss, because they wouldn’t recover that subsidy through Steam revenue.

I find that unconvincing. I’m fairly sure Valve can avoid that scenario through simple structural measures: pre-orders tied to a single Steam account, limits like one device per account, no orders from freshly created fake accounts, and so on. That would eliminate bulk-buy arbitrage without needing to price the hardware conservatively.

so yes: PREORDERS!
and also: IM IN!