Funny thing noone talks about, they had a bunch of existing skins for other devices that use Valve IP, for years. The big thing here is the Steam Machine case cancellation, but they actually also removed lots of other designs they had the entire time.
So not only they flew too close to the Sun on this new product, they ended up losing a bunch of existing products that Valve never called then out on earlier.
I don't like the relative "3 times as common as smoking" in the title. It could just mean that less and less people are smoking and be a good stat. Or the reverse. But by itself it's just misleading.