First of all, I have to say one thing : Take everything i'm about to say with a grain of salt. Because honestly, I don't believe these rumors myself. I believe the Switch WILL be on Pascal, I believe it will be decently powerful, and I think it will work at AT LEAST 600 TFlops docked, maybe around 300 undocked. But who knows, I'm certainly not a "trustworthy market analyzer" like the source of these rumors.
That being said, saying that it's a "balancing act" and that Nintendo couldn't do any better with the price point they're targeting is simply ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, the Switch IS a revolutionary machine : It takes the basic concept of crossplay(an afterthought, albeit nice sony feature) and makes it a main stay with WAY MORE OPTIONS than the Playstation's crossplay feature. But still, from what we know , EVEN IF the Switch is on Maxwell, they could have gotten much better peformance out of the chip for the same price. Why they're so scared to use the cooling system they put in the system themselves, I have no idea. As someone who deals with my own personal cooling in my PC, it's obvious they could have gotten a decent boost if they used the fans better.
But why not use pascal? Assuming this rumor is true, that is. It would have made it a lot better.
Edit : I was trying to say that the chip they were using, iirc from the reports was underclocked? They should have a much better clock rate with the cooling system.
I'm not sure the two architectures, Maxwell and Pascal, are very different though:
