Games

Fair enough. I don't think I'd really use it that much either but Steam has pretty great cloud saves and such so I might play a couple of rounds of Balatro or something while I waited and pick it up again back home on the couch on the Steam deck.

Waiting when picking someone up, waiting when charging, waiting because you couldn’t go inside with them (at least during Covid), waiting because they had to use the bathroom and tou don’t know how long it’s gonna take, waiting for an employee to bring you stuff (“curbside” pickup), waiting because you had to show up early in order to get a parking spot but the place isn’t open, lots of things

You probably wait in your car a lot more than you realize. I pick up friends to go various places as I'm usually the designated driver, I'm often waiting out in the parking lot for people to come out. It may only be a few minutes, but a lot of the regular built in games (not steam) will load up in just a minute or so and occupy that time.

Or waiting at the cell phone lot to pick people up from the airport.

Charging waiting is likely the most common, but unlike what most non-EV drivers seem to think most of those stops are only about 15 minutes on a road trip. You aren't charging up fully each time, you just charge up for the next leg, and a buffer, and the car calculates it all for you. Otherwise you really should have a home charging solution, it's cheaper and you always have a full charge you don't need to think about. If for some reason you need to fully charge at a supercharger, that can take longer. Just like your phone can charge to 50-70% super quickly and the rest is slow, the car battery is similar, just much larger capacity. So that can take a while longer. The longest I've ever had to charge though for a nearly full battery from about 20% was 40 minutes. And that was because I was going to a very remote area, away from major highways with no charging infrastructure, so I made sure I had enough to make it back.

Most people probably would just play on their phones, but the in car games just provide an alternative. Just like Netflix and the other streaming services in the car. They're there for those waiting times, however infrequent they may be.

I have a modern car (2022) but not a Tesla, and I can only use the Google voice assistant while I'm driving, I'm not allowed to type

You ignored the sentences on either side of that:

However, we now learn that Tesla is dropping the feature. The automaker wrote to people taking delivery of new Model S and Model X vehicles:

Tesla is updating the gaming computer in your Model X and your vehicle is no longer capable of playing Steam games. All other entertainment and app functionalities are unaffected.

It doesn’t sound like current owners are affected by the change.

Notice the phrasing of New vehicles and writing to people expecting delivery of them, not current owners.

Yeah, but you can't keep buying second hand cars. Some brand really needs to start making dumb electric cars (it at least allow you to replace/upgrade the computer easily).

That doesn't have any bearing on whether Tesla wants to officially support it on more vehicles.

If something breaks, people will blame Tesla first, even if they changed absolutely nothing. The average person has very little technical knowledge and essentially thinks of all of their electronics as a magic box that just works, until it doesn't. They don't care about the how, the why, or the who, they just care about whether it works or not. And if it doesn't, the first person they blame is whoever makes the box, even if they have nothing to do with the software the person was using.