I haven't bothered with gaming laptops in a while, but it seems like the work valve put into Proton is paying dividends. Steam deck is punching far above it's weight class. Apparently a lot of games now are running better in Linux via proton than natively in Windows, which is kind of mind boggling. I don't have to do any troubleshooting and everything runs great. I'd guess to get comparable performance on a laptop you'd have to spend 2-3x as much. Last time I used a gaming laptop it struggled on any 'current' games with lots of fuckery to get it running smooth.

But like I said, I've long been out of the gaming laptop scene because I just never found them worth the trouble. Steam deck is the opposite of that and I play it in favor of my PC more than I care to admit.