Let’s say the PC doesn’t count and you aren’t taking into account backwards compatibility, emulation, online play, homebrew games, and the cost/availability of games.
I feel like I’d want to choose the PS3. Like the Xbox 360 it had a decent lifespan and a lot of games were produced for it. A lot of which are already some of my favorites.
The only things that would make hesitant are I feel like a lot of modern games are larger and have open worlds which I feel like that could be nice in the long run and many of my favorite games for the PS3 have been re-released.
There’s a very important difference between what you can do with a thing, and what the thing was intended for, and what it is best at doing.
Wikipedia that you referred to before calls Steam deck a handheld gaming computer. If Steam Deck is a console why wouldn’t a gaming PC fall into the category of console.
This all seems arbitrary. It is all subjective anyways. You can see steam deck as different from PC. I’ll look at Steam Deck and PC as the same. So to me both are either console or PC.
You can also take it up with valve for their it’s a pc comments. Even the reveal they did with ign calling it a handheld gaming PC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtiRGTZvGM
Even the Steam Deck store page description is
At best described as “console-like experience”
https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck
This is also a nice watch of Gabe talking about the openness of the PC ecosystem and how if you want to you can install epic game store or run oculus quest on the Steam Deck. Take what you will from it but I feel like Gabe and the people who worked on the Steam Deck see it more as a PC than console.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kO6Dj2XNfY&t=588