I would say games did that as more of a “because we should use the screen for something” thing rather than something essential to the game. Even the way XCX used it (and was praised for using the Gamepad correctly) would be transferable to another menu screen. I don’t see much convenience gained by simply looking at another screen rather than simply pressing the select button.
There is one benefit to the Gamepad over the joy cons as far as I can see, and that’s that it has a touchscreen interface when in console mode. The Switch can have that too in handheld mode, and in console mode it can use the gyroscopic pointer (which works much like the Wii IR) it simple directional controls. When it comes to applications that benefit from this, they’re not going to be very action oriented of attention is required between two screens - mostly things like Miiverse and Netflix; IMO the Apple TV remote is superior to the Gamepad for this sort of thing since you don’t need to look away from the TV screen to control what’s happening. Future joy cons will have trackpads if they’re important for any of Nintendo’s applications - right now I don’t think games generally benefit from these: maybe Civ 6?
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
