He specifically cited bad battery life on the ROG Ally and Lenovo Go, saying that getting only one hour of battery life isn’t enough. The Steam Deck (especially the OLED model) does a lot better battery wise, but improving power efficiency should really help with any games that are maxing out the Deck’s power.
The thing with “AI” or better still, ML cores, is that they’re very specialized. Apple hasn’t been slapping ML cores in all of their cpus since the iPhone 8 because they are super powerful, it’s because they can do some things (that the hardware would have no problem doing anyway) by sipping power. You don’t have to think about AI as in the requirements for huge LLM like ChatGPT that require data centers, think about it like a hardware video decoder: This thing could play easily 1080p video! Or, going with raw cpu power rather than hardware decoding, 480p. It’s why you can watch hours of videos on your phone, but try doing anything that hits the cpu and the battery melts.
Edit: my example has been bothering me for days now. I want to clarify to avoid any possible misunderstanding that hardware video decoding has nothing to do with AI, it’s just another very specialized chip.