Nintendo is committing a lot of the same lethal mistakes they did with the WiiU, and more.

[Arkaign]

OP is pretty close to my thoughts, and I say that as someone who thought the WiiU's exclusives were far and away better than Sony's or Microsoft's.

Can a company succeed in selling a console without a lot of success in getting third party support and being people's 'primary' gaming box? I know Sony and Microsoft make a lot of money by :

Selling 1st party games
Selling 3rd party games (platform fees)
Selling paid online
Selling ad revenue
Selling expensive peripherals

Nintendo has the 1st party games and peripherals down pat, but misses a lot of revenue in being the place to play Cod/Madden/BF/Fifa/etc. Pretty much everyone has a primary console they play by default, because of friends/controller or whatever.

Tech wise I won't go into extreme detail, but it would take a combination of high cost and technological miracles for this to be any more than about Xbox One level, and it's probably a fair bit under that. IOW : perfectly fantastic for Nintendo IPs, but multiplats will suffer even if they get ported at all.

The Wii was one of those landmark moments where there was a complete craze about it. In a lot of ways, people bought it because it was popular, which sounds circular, but I know so many people that bought it for Wii Fit or Wii Sports, heck they were all over retirement homes even. It was a cultural phenomenon. Those were different times though. The 360 was barely getting started to be honest, and PS3 was this ludicrously expensive thing that was struggling a bit (talking USA market 06-08).

Let's look at the last 20 years of Nintendo Consoles

N64
Gamecube
Wii
WiiU

Show me the one that had great third party support?
Aside from the Wii, show me the one that had significant sales success?

1st party clearly isn't the problem, because I'd put the libraries of Nintendo Exclusives on those system up there as many of the best games of all time.

Price wasn't the problem for most of those, though WiiU was hamstrung a bit IMHO due to the BoM cost of the tablet (I still believe to this day had WiiU launched as Super Wii or whatever haha, and been just the same hardware sans tablet for $179, that it would have possibly double the install base)

I like Nintendo, I want them to succeed. I'm just not sure where the Switch fits in that will dramatically change the story for them. For those that want a good home console and don't care about mobility, it inarguably IS a compromise with the tablet form factor. Because think about it, the tablet choice causes :

1- Expenses to be tied up in a screen you don't care about or need.
2- Expenses to be tied up in a dock apparatus you don't care about or need.
3- Expenses to be tied up in a battery setup you don't care about or need.
4- Performance to be lower due to form factor constrictions (heat dissipation, pcb layout, size, power consumption)

In other words, the very design of Switch means that a hypothetical $250 device is instantly weaker than had it bad a traditional design without the mobile/tablet/battery path of tablet form factor. At the same time, it also means that if you decide on the exact same performance profile, something that might cost $250 to deliver in a tablet form factor could be sold for $129 or so without the screen, battery, and dock.

That doesn't matter if you DO want that as a compelling reason to buy the system, but IS that a compelling reason to buy the system? That's up to you. I would counter that the proven reason to buy Nintendo systems is their proven track record of outstanding 1st party titles that are often landmarks for their generations.

That's all I can say for now, I'll wait with everyone else for the results on this. I'm not very optimistic, but I suppose even if it fails to gain major support, at least it will bring some more excellent nintendo games, and that's a positive in my book.