Regarding Nintendo Handhelds, was the Switch concept inevitable?

[Illusion]

I think that it is more of a response to smartphone gaming than the failure of the Wii U where Nintendo needed something to differentiate its handheld gaming experience. The docking feature does this very well.

I am sure that if Nintendo could they would love to have kept their handheld and home console business separate. For over 2 decades Nintendo basically had a near monopoly in the handheld gaming business and it was a cash cow with very little input cost (just release a formulaic Pokemon game, or NSMB game every 2 years and rake in the money). It is clear that smartphone gaming has taken a lot of this market away from Nintendo. The Wii U being a flop probably sped this decision up a bit, but I think Nintendo would have probably never released a successor to the 3DS regardless of how well the Wii U did. There just isn't enough market-share left for traditional dedicated handhelds.

This isn't the first time this happened to Nintendo. The GBA was a joke in terms of hardware and was probably at least 5 years behind what handheld technology was capable of at the time of its release. It's just that Nintendo had zero competition at the time and really didn't need to put any effort into making a competitive piece of hardware. When the PSP came, Nintendo got scared and whipped together the DS which was a huge jump in graphical power as well as in features. The NS is just Nintendo's similar response to smartphone gaming.