I understand why they couldn't sell it at a loss. It's a general purpose computing device, and it would be too easy for a call centre somewhere to buy 100 of them, which would lead to 0 game sales for Valve...

I'm not saying they will, but I hear people repeat this as if it's fact, and it's pretty nieve. They've had other products people wanted to scalp, or whatever, before. They have a system for it. You have to have a Steam account older than a set date before you can purchase, and your number of purchases is limited.

That's even assuming it makes sense. Yeah, the price could be low for the hardware compared to average consumer products, but does that mean it's lower than the, comperatively, cheap hardware used by offices? Almost certainly not. They probably don't even have a GPU. They have to compete with gaming hardware prices, not office computers. A low gaming hardware price is still going to be expensive for an office. It's also going to be expensive for the product for a data center. They have specialty hardware they use that's purpose-built for the task. Sure, once upon a time the PS was used for a supercomputer. That was a much different time for hardware.