What is the purpose of Valve's Steam gaming console?

Hello,

I was doing some reading about the new Valve Steam gaming console. Apparently, it was released about 3 weeks ago. Their touting it's purpose being to plug a gap between PC gaming and console gaming, which sounds like a good idea. It runs the Linux operating system, but Linux isn't exactly known for having a large selection of games. Quite the contrary, Linux has very few games for it.... at best. Being an "open source" platform, I'm wondering if the true purpose of this console will be to allow the gaming community to develop "indie" games for it? I can't see much in the way of commercial titles being released for an open source Linux games platform. Maybe I'm wrong...

Thanks