This is not correct, but there are many people making this claim. Yuzu is arguably the most popular emulator, and only around 20% of games work well out of the box (https://yuzu-emu.org/game/). A further 30% require tweaks, or operate sub-optimally. The remaining 50% either don't run at all or offer a terrible experience. The thing to remember is that even if you pick one of the games in the "perfect" category, it's still not perfect. For example, you often have to content with hours and hours of "shader" loading. This means choppy and and strange graphical glitches. Further, drivers for various systems are not perfect, and sometimes certain features utilising, for example, the gyroscope, don't work correctly.

There is a VERY vocal minority of Linux gamers who have VERY rose coloured glasses on for anything Linux. I expect some of them to respond to this comment with some variation of "well I have never had any problems with Yuzu. It's the most amazing thing I've ever used in my whole life!!!"

I own a Switch, but I'm still debating whether I play BoTW on Deck or Switch. Either way I'll probably buy it on Switch because developers should be rewarded for making good games, but it's handy for me to have all of my games in one place. Plus the Deck is a much more comfortable for me to hold - more ergonomic, better fit for larger hands.

To offer a counterpoint - the Deck is heavy. For a system that is meant to be chiefly used as a handheld, the thing borders on being as heavy as your average laptop, which gets quite tiring on your arms after a while.

The Switch' fit is a lot lighter by comparison, which is quite nice.

Can I play the Steam Deck handheld (with controllers attached), on kickstand with controllers detracted and split, docked with controllers in a dock to make a single controller, and docked with controller split and turned sideways for two player?

The Deck is impressive and wonderful, but it's not exactly a high end gaming device. Emulating ARM code efficiently requires a significant amount of CPU power and my experience is that the Deck doesn't quite have the CPU capacity to keep up with heavier emulated titles.

I expect the new Logitech handheld (or the many other, even more expensive competitors) to perform much better in this regard.

In a perfect world, emulators such as Skyline would be developed further. As the Switch is just a five year old mid tier Android tablet with a controller attached, I can only imagine the experience if you were to use the KVM capabilities of the upcoming Android 14 to run Switch software at near native performance on modern devices. Just buy one of those controller grips for phone and tablets and you're off!

iPhones/iPads would do even better, but I doubt Apple is going to let you use the necessary APIs to virtualize like that.

It's a shame Skyline has been killed off. With terrible games like that Pokémon game needing much more CPU power than the Switch can provide, I imagine even legitimate players would be interested in a way to play their switch games on modern hardware.

Problem with emulators is that at some point they will fail you, and you will lose some saves.