It's pretty much a given now that they've had this bad experience with the 3DS launch.
In terms of raw processing power I guess the console will be somewhat faster than PS3 and Xbox360 but not that much.
And I can't believe some people are actually estimating the controller to be $100 in production cost... cut that in half and you're good to go. There are real tablets being produced for 100 bucks, this one's got a low res screen (640x480), no multitouch, no heavy internals and no flash storage.
Production costs for most products are way lower than you'd think. It's taxes, retailer margins and advertisement that also add a lot of cost. Many European countries got like 20% taxes on products. So if you buy console X for €300 that's more than €50 of taxes. Look at the latest PSP model for instance which retails for €99.99. There's up to €20 taxes on it, shipping costs, advertisement, retailer margin, etc. and they still make a profit on each unit sold.
Basically, the console without the tablet looks like it could be sold for $250-300 while breaking even. It depends on the amount of flash storage they put in and the final specs but that's roughly what we're looking at I think. Then add $50 for the tablet and I think they'll sell it for $299. That's assuming rumors of a quad core CPU and huge amounts of RAM are false, of course. Looking at the size of the console (it's way smaller than current HD consoles) I doubt it will be much more capable than a PS3 or Xbox360, though.
Will they turn a profit in the beginning? I don't think so. But I doubt we're looking at anything above $299 at launch... and I still think they should've made the tablet optional.
