This is such a stupid decision, and then even for such an inconsequential feature that so far only works for two games. And I doubt there is any significant group that would upgrade from 12th/13th Gen even if it would be more widespread. All this does is create a lasting bad impression of people that recently bought a new Intel CPU. The person in charge needs firing.
That new Wifi chip also supports dual-band simultaneous (DBS), as far as I understand. They already use this on Windows with other DBS chips like Intel AX411 or Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 and their Steam Networking API to achieve lower latency in their popular multiplayer games. I wonder if they will do this on SteamOS too, also potentially for simultaneous downloads over both bands. Also comes with a dedicated Bluetooth antenna.
Also I wonder if they upgraded the SD card slot to support DDR200, was that benchmarked in any review?
At least for home use it’s really not. The de-facto is still 1G Ethernet from 1999.
10GBASE-T exists since almost two decades (2006) and is still expensive, and even the “affordable” NBase-T 2.5G stuff (2016) is only really cheap for the cards itself, most “router”/gateways have no or only a single 2.5G port and 2.5G switches are overpriced, unmanaged, and still in a “premium niche”.
In contrast, you had Wifi6 APs for some while now that could do ~1.8Gb/s to clients and now with Wifi7 you can reach ludicrous wireless speeds of 5Gb/s+ to clients, but I’m doubtful switches or even 5/10G cards will get much cheaper because of this. It seems manufacturers don’t want to address the market of people having cabled infrastructure and instead everything is supposed to wireless with be wireless mesh-backbone now.