Valve are making a console?

A couple articles have popped up this morning mentioning that a new console may well be in the works from Valve would you believe. I really wasn't expecting this from the guys at Valve. I knew they must have been working on something as tweaking DOTA and CSGO won't kill all their time. While this is still only a rumour, I edge on the side of believing this as there was an interview with Penny Arcade I believe it was, where Gabe mentioned if they had to sell hardware they would. Now with the "Steam Box" rumoured, you start putting 2 and 2 together. If this is true and they are making some sort of console platform, I am going to put bets on now that it will have cross platform capabilities just as Portal 2 did between PC and Playstation. This is something that I would love to see, and not just from the "Steam Box" but all consoles. Microsoft could have been doing this for years with XBL and GFWL all they had to do would to counter the unfair skill gap between keyboard & mouse and controller, which is apparently why they never did it, would be to make the Xbox compatible with keyboard and mouse. It's not rocket science. Anyway I'm not going to get in to that rant because I've done it far too many times before and it will take to long for my likings. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this matter and I really hope they can pull it off because I could see this being the start of something awesome for gamers across the field. If they allow cross platform gaming I could easily see Sony and Microsoft doing the same at some point down the line to keep up.