My plan is to stay dawless with the hardware, specially for live gigs and jams.
But its a good option for DAW based work!
I don't know how that is looked upon in the dawless scene, but a small and even very low powered laptop or tablet (windows) could run just a 8x8 midi interface, I have a midex 8, and do all the routing, much more flexible then other solutions for the dawless world. You could routeh clocks, notes and controllers that way. But maybe it is considered cheating lol.
If I went on the road (not likely) then I would do it like that, with my microfreak, moog sub37, novation circuit and arq 96 (which is the only usb midi only device). Now I use then in my studio fully DAWed.
Cheers! Hope you figure it out.