Have you ever seen anyone gather around a mobile phone connected to a TV for playing? The first step preventing that already is that people don't want to connect/disconnect hardware constantly.

I acknowledge some points in the article. It will probably be hard/impossible to make a living making games for this console alone. And I was also already wondering if they have any chance finishing the software in time when they are only starting now. But if they manage to release it in time for that price I wouldn't care much - for 99$ a console that's rootable - that alone sounds good enough for buying to me. Also I think his worries about porting the input of games for a controller are overblown, that's not exactly the hardest part when writing a game.

It depends on the game, but controls are a huge part of the game experience and many types of games are just fundamentally horrible to play on a particular set of controls. Bad controls will simply ruin a game. I remember the pain of playing Mortal Kombat on a keyboard for example, also bear in mind how long it took for consoles to make FPS games tolerable on a controller. This is worse than that, you might have some luck in porting a touchscreen game over to mouse control or vice versa, but touch control to gamepad?

How on earth would one play "cut the rope" on a controller?

I agree though that it might well be worth the $99 just for use as a media box and to play old arcade ROMs on but the question is whether that is a viable business model for them?

If it can do TV stuff, then it will be an overall better solution, and you won't have to deal with the hassle of connecting the cable to your TV and also a controller to the phone.