Its still a full desktop computer, regardless of whether you can hold it in your hand or not.

and because your monitor comment reminded me, I dont remember where I saw it so I cant pull a link to it, but there was a guy who recently won a gamejam or some other similar programming competition, with a steamdeck plugged into a monitor.

I could understand, and even agree, with your position if it was some specialty single purpose hardware running a heavily stripped down and modified linux to make something like those chinese emulator handhelds... But its not, Its literally a full use OS on desktop hardware, the only difference is that it fits in your hand.

So like it or not, Thats a daily driver linux desktop, People use and interact with it daily, doing everything from web browsing to production work on it, So it definitely counts as a linux machine and should be reflected in the linux statistics.

Only one being pedantic is you, and about the shape of the computer of all things.