Making mobile apps is not Nintendo's style either ... Nintendo is going to be forced to make some changes if they want to survive in the mobile world. Either they convince kids to stop playing mobile games and go back to their DSes, or they accomodate the modern reality of how kids play. 

I think they made the decision for number 2, and made that decision probably a couple of years ago. And I think that was a hard decision for Nintendo to make, but they realized they could not compete against mobile. The move to make mobile games and the start of the NX hardware project likely occured at around the same time. 

PS4/XB1 are not portable, I think you just need to lose the idea that Nintendo is competing with them. I think they're honestly more worried about other tablet makers ripping off the ideas the NX will have at this stage, they've conceded the traditional home market to Sony/MS entirely, I don't think they care about that. 

There are still costs to a portable device, just because it's portable and has "less powah!" doesn't mean it costs less to make. A LCD + touch panel are more expensive than any processor almost all the time, those batteries don't come for free either. 

Being a hybrid doesn't make you magically immune to comparison with other gaming devices, it means you're competing in two red oceans instead of one.

Well having "lower power" doesn't make the hardware automatically cheaper to make either. 

The NX will have to have a screen ... a 7-8 inch screen even with a cheap resolution is still going to cost in the range of $40-$50, the battery doesn't come for free either, then you have you actual chipset costs ... just because it only outputs say 600 GFLOPS doesn't mean it costs 1/3 the price. That's not how component pricing works. Priced out this thing could be pretty close to an XBox One in cost. 

It doesn't need to be 1/3 or even 1/2 the price of PS4/X1, just not so close in price that it invites comparison.

Like I said, this device very well could cost as much as the XBox 1. Pricing it so it doesn't invite comparison could mean Nintendo eating $50 in losses. 

Let it invite comparison anyway ... there is no device on the planet that runs something close to XB1 graphics on the road. Nothing like that on the market is even close, not even the $1000 iPad Pro because no one codes to the metal for that Apple A9X chip. 

Honestly, if this sucker costs $300 or more, I don't think it has a Snowball's chance in hell and I think it will be the end of Nintendo's hardware business.

$269.99 I think could happen. 

You can't even buy a Wii U for that price today, lol, that's $80 cheaper than the Wii U was on launch day, it's over a $100 cheaper than a Wii + DS, and a Wii U + 3DS costs ($500) today and it'll do the same thing as those two devices better, plus it might also run Android apps. I mean short of a kitchen sink there's not much else Nintendo could put into the thing. 

I think it needs to be understood there is nothing even remotely close to that power that's portable .... nothing even in the same galaxy. There might be comparable powered chips inside of an iPad Pro, which is $1000+ but no games/app comes close to using that power. You're talking about something that could run even PS4/XB1 ports while the PS4/XB1 generation is still going on, even the PSP and Vita could not display PS2 or PS3 graphics for their day. 

People need to be a little realistic on the price thing ... for what's being described by Eurogamer is still a pretty whopping impressive piece of kit that effectively replaces two Nintendo systems. I paid $600 for the Wii U and 3DS (bought both at launch), this would be less than half the cost. 

Graphically they are a generation behind, I can provide examples and images pointing out the flaws even with the best looking games.
Artistically, Nintendo has always been in a league of it's own though.

The abuse of flops is real. :(

You should probably look into what it really is and how it apply's to games.

In most cases, it's true, lower power hardware usually has conservative transister counts... So it should be cheaper to manufacture, if all things were equal.
There are few edge cases though.

There is the nVidia Tax you need to consider, they have all the eggs in their basket this GPU cycle so they think (and are) pricing chips at whatever level they want.

I don't think it's relevant to compare the cost of two devices because it is not going to be seen that way by the general consumer, it's going to be seen as a single gaming device and judged as such against other singular gaming devices.

The GPU is cheap, there's not a chance Nintendo would've made the deal with Nvidia if it wasn't. Nvidia has no one to sell the Tegra to ... who the fuck needs that much power in a tablet? And even if they did almost every major mobile maker is in bed with an established chip partner already. Nintendo had all the leverage here. If Nvidia wasn't going to give Nintendo a mobile chip, I'm sure Qualcomm, DMP, PowerVR/Imagination, or Samsung would be happy to get on that gravy train. So whatever deal Nvidia gave Nintendo it must've been better than anything else on the table, I'm inclined to believe Semi-Accurate's report that Nintendo basically bent Nvidia over for this deal. 

Nvidia's gain from it likely will be that they can finally tout the Tegra as being in a multi-multi-million selling flagship product to other vendors, giving the Tegra line legitimacy, and if NX is a success, well then they can certainly negotiate a better deal for the NX2. They've already invested the R&D into the Parker Tegra and while self driving cars are a cool idea, it's not like that's going to be an overnight thing, we are probably 4-5 years away from self driving cars being a real mainstream product. Nvidia needed the NX deal for Tegra bad. 

The LCD display is going to be the big cost, as with the Wii U ... a cheap display will still run Nintendo probably more for the LCD + touch panel than the actual chipset.