It's a concrete target for developers. Most new games will want to run smoothly on those specs. And studios will learn how to make the most of the hardware available. Take a look at early PS3 games versus near end of its lifecycle - huge improvement in fidelity, running on same hw. Compared to consoles, the PC games (especially indies) are not really that optimized on any random machine. If you can squeeze 30% more performance out of same specs that stream machine offers then the specs look a bit nicer, no? I think it is realistic, by learning about bottlenecks and orchestrating the CPU/GPU throughput. People were bickering that PS4 was underpowered as well but it's more that on PC you need better hw just to compensate for lack of concrete-hardware-focused optimisations.

Also I feel the article compares the prices to what they were 6 months ago. Can you find similar gaming machines at this price from a reputable supplier? Any that are guaranteed to be well supported with driver and OS updates?

Another great thing is, if you are gaming on Linux you gain so much even if you don't buy the machine. So I'm happy with this even though I don't have immediate plans to buy one.