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greenmedic88 on 14 November 2016
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Clearly, this is a case of PR. But, there is nothing insidious or misleading about it.

Nvidia is going to positively promote the product of their partnership with Nintendo as evidenced by their forward thinking (anything that involves at least a ten year plan). They want a long term partnership that will give them a permanent place in the console and portable space, rather than as an OEM parts supplier playing for bids with each new hardware generation against AMD. They clearly did not want to play that game, which is how SCE and MS ended up with AMD chips powering their consoles.

Naturally, the first thing to come to mind with the Switch was the Nvidia Shield, but that serves as a streamer for Nvidia GPU powered gaming PCs rather than a dedicated, independent gaming device with its own software ecosystem (sorry, Android support doesn't really count). Switch gives them a partnership stake in Nintendo's ecosystem.

This allows Nintendo to place more focus on the software end of things as it is their IPs first and foremost that represent the company best. Yes, they are still a toy company that can sell their customer base on multiple versions of their handhelds like no other (and product design and UI still play a key role), but this new arrangement grants them access to the most recent hardware tech without having to design the architecture from the ground up, which is a very expensive approach (which hit its peak with SCE's CBE R&D for the PS3) to game systems.

Look, I'm not expecting MS/SCE console beating or even matching performance here; hopefully no one has been that mislead by the enthusiasm. But what we do appear to have with the Switch is a strong partnership between one of the best in business with regards to game IPs and game design and the premiere (sorry AMD fans) IC/GPU developer that both appear to want to be lasting, even multigenerational if Switch gains traction.

Nintendo really hasn't competed head to head in terms of hardware performance since the GC, arguably even the N64, so this is nothing new for the last 15 years of Nintendo hardware at minimum, so I'm not sure why the uproar.

Nintendo is not competing with the PS4 Pro or MS Scorpio, partly because they can't, but mostly because they're going in a different direction, which indicates another Blue Ocean strategy.