Oh ye of limited scope and understanding ... ever heard of bluetooth ? It's a lot easier to carry a tablet and joypad in your suitcase when on the go than a PC/XBox/PS. Honestly
honestly, keep trying. I own normal 64bit haswell nb. It has touchscreen and it can be used even as tablet (with full power). It runs wide spectrum of Steam games, same as I use the touchscreen pretty heavily for normal Windows work (thanks for Win8 btw, yet a lot of people hate them on "PC", ever wondered why? Because it IS designed for touchscreen and is pretty terrible without it.)
There are aspects people seems (mistakenly) imagining. Things like:
1) you can use mouse (or other controller) atop with touchscreen for gaming - no you can't. Even in notebook mode touchscreen is far away. You need to raise your hands to reach it. In that moment it become uncomfortable and low precise. If you play the game and you have one hand on WASD and the second on the mouse, you don't want to break the grasp, put your hands up to simply "click" something, you can do with mouse. Same with controller. If you played any game you would know it.
Also please try Defense Grid. Good game and it has both, mouse controls and touchscreen controls. It switches them dynamically and they did both well. So please, compare those to see the differences. In gestures, control positions and overall ergonomy. It works because it's a simple game so two really different control UIs are easy to do. You don't want to spend time to create that for an Elite game.
2) they can do completely different controls which doesn't affect PC controls at all - yup, they may. I know 2 games that did it right with touchscreen (both really simple) and about 5 they did it right with controller. And about 80 that did it wrong. They all claims they did "proper PC controls" while its atrocious and clearly controller/touchscreen in design. Play games like Galaxy on Fire 2 (or use Win8 metro) with mouse to see how bad touchscreen ergonomics is with a mouse. Or Skyrim if you want to see bad K&M GUI conversion (and compare it to the Morrowind that is really designed for K&M while same game in nature).
3) touchscreen can emulate other controls, like buttons, joysticks, thruster, mouse - no it can't. It's a touchscreen. It has different type of gestures and it doesn't provide feedback other devices do.
So please stop trying to create some degraded hybrids to have 60% control capabilities instead of 40% and simply use the device which is meant for specific tasks <SNIP - word removed - Styggron>
Tablets are NOT gaming devices. Period. They never will be. There really is a reason why my GTX itself weights more then two iPads and consume 20x more power when it does what it is meant to do.
So before ideas about normal gaming on tablets and how easy conversion can be do yourself a favor and get some touchscreen desktop monitor or at least notebook (capable of running known PC games) and try the touchscreen to feel the difference and to know the strengths and weaknesses of it. There is no other way to notice all the little changes that needs to be made (well, GUI design and ergonomics class can help too, but education is not "cool" today).
