I have been assuming they had stock set aside for some kind of Machine + Controller bundle.
Could be — I haven’t seen news along those lines and the Steam Machine description on their website doesn’t presently say anything about coming with a Steam Controller — but I suppose that it’s not unreasonable. But it’s also worth remembering that they’re probably aiming for the console market with the Steam Machine, and a lot of people use consoles for local multiplayer games and are probably going to want more than one controller for that.
Now, local multiplayer is less common among PC games than console games. But, especially with console ports, it’s definitely out there.
Could be — I haven’t seen news along those lines and the Steam Machine description on their website doesn’t presently say anything about coming with a Steam Controller — but I suppose that it’s not unreasonable. But it’s also worth remembering that they’re probably aiming for the console market with the Steam Machine, and a lot of people use consoles for local multiplayer games and are probably going to want more than one controller for that.
Now, local multiplayer is less common among PC games than console games. But, especially with console ports, it’s definitely out there.
https://store.steampowered.com/search?tags=7368&supportedlang=english&ndl=1
That says that there are 7,933 games currently on the Steam store that are tagged as Local Multiplayer.