It seems like almost all the improvements are being made on the Steam OS side. The next Steam OS update (3.5) should have some wonderful new features related to shader compilation, etc. Valve can really tune the OS to the device and they'll continue to do so.
Yes it's true that you can't play specific games - but there are so many games that you can play. Eventually as SteamDeck becomes more common you'll see more and more mainstream support.