Valve Announces the Steam Controller – The Official Steam Gamepad

Today, Valve launched the final announcement in their three phase plan for fully invading our living rooms. The Steam Controller is coming.
Monday saw the news of SteamOS, a free, Linux based OS for running Steam on any machine and playing games. Tuesday brought us word of Steam Machines, third party built and produced Steam boxes running SteamOS. These suckers are supposedly intended for all audiences and different forms will accommodate different budgets.
The final piece of the puzzle is this brand new gamepad. The Steam Controller looks nuts, folks.
It rocks two trackpads instead of analog sticks, sports a touch screen in the center, supposedly supports all titles available on Steam, boasts “super-precise haptic feedback” and is completely hackable. Here’s how Valve clarifies that last bit:

Openness
The Steam Controller was designed from the ground up to be hackable. Just as the Steam Community and Workshop contributors currently deliver tremendous value via additions to software products on Steam, we believe that they will meaningfully contribute to the design of the Steam Controller. We plan to make tools available that will enable users to participate in all aspects of the experience, from industrial design to electrical engineering. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

The Steam Controller will be able to work with any machine running the Steam client. That means you can use it on your current PC or your future Steam Machine. You’ll also be able to stick with your keyboard and mouse setup, too.
Pricing for the Steam Controller has not been announced yet.