As for joysticks, you ever tried to play a flight sim without one (of course it was your smart ass answer, so I'll let it slide).
On your last point: Asus, Acer, and Dell are pretty smart not to try to be a major player in the game console market. The market is crowded as hell (3 huge competitors with a several-year lead in install base and minimum 8/9 year lead in mindshare for Xbox, decade and a half for PlayStation, and decades for Nintendo), their competitors have a pretty big back library, and you're talking about hardware companies that don't generally develop software (and when they do, it tends to suck). Licensing an engine isn't cheap, and building a good game around it isn't any easier: there are a bunch of UE3 licensees that put out crap games, including Too Human, Stranglehold, Area 51, etc. The best these guys could do is to pay id to have Rage on their systems day-and-date, and then pick up on the scraps of gaming on Linux (and as a Linux fan, I know how scrap the games tend to be). Remember: game consoles aren't bought based on the hardware or OS inside them, they're bought on whether or not there is a big library good games for it.
TL;DR version: crowded, competitive market won't be overtaken by the likes of Frozen Bubble and Warsow.
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!