Like you said, these are Steam Deck prototypes, not the controller. They made a cheap controller with the same potential profile of the Deck without the screen because it’s cheaper. It was to iterate on the Deck quickly and cheaply. They’d never release a controller like that. They do the same thing for all their products.

They already tried a ton of designs for the Steam Controller to figure out the ergonomics of that. They’ll likely iterate some more with Version 2, but it’s likely to follow the controller design, not the deck design. It has very different considerations since it doesn’t need to contain a screen.