That's a fair point. I designed the stations such that people could bring their own computer and hook it up to my monitor and peripherals. However, in practice, almost no one has ever bothered to do this. People bring their laptops and leave them in the bag, because why bother when there's already a high-end machine available with all the games installed? And with the Steam Cloud / Battle.net / Chrome synchronizing their configuration, it's like they're using their own machine anyway.
I can tell you, having been doing LAN parties for over 15 years, we definitely get far more gaming in on these machines than at any heterogeneous setup. Typical LAN parties involve several hours of copying games around...
Yeah, I remember that. :) These days you can totally go to a LAN party running Linux. I went to one running FreeBSD, even. And my machines actually ran only Linux up until this past weekend. WINE is pretty good... Starcraft 2 works, Steam works, most Source-engine and Unreal-engine games work, etc. But there were just enough bugs that I eventually gave in.
I can tell you, having been doing LAN parties for over 15 years, we definitely get far more gaming in on these machines than at any heterogeneous setup. Typical LAN parties involve several hours of copying games around...