I highly doubt the NS will sell lower than the Wii U, which was riddled with problems, and the general audience didn't know about or like. The question is though, how much more will it sell over the Wii U?

My point was that the Wii U could have had Pokemon and maybe it would have eeked out a paltry 18 to 20mil.  Cause no ammount of quality content matters if your ads are uninformative (like most of the Wii U's ads), embarrassing (everything from launch to mid 2014 and still at times beyond), clumsy (almost all of them), generic (all the 2012 and early 2013 ads), or absent (the Wii U had incredibly, inexcusably sparse promotion).  The 3DS had better everything frankly.  Like I said, doesn't matter much what the Switch has, if it has the same marketing muscle as the Wii U, you may as well burry it now.  if it has an aggressive ad campaign, I don't think it needs Pokemon.  

Also, what 16, 32, 128 thing?  If you mean the rumors concerning the size of cartridges, internal storage, and SD card support, consider these things: 1) I guarantee you the 16 gig being the max is horseshit (Breath of the Wild is looking like it would barely fit on a 20, 16 is out of the question and MonolithSoft, an internal studio, struggled with the Wii U's capacity on disc, and besides it would make NO sense to make that the maximum), 2) if the games are playing from the physical medium (the PS4 and Xbone do not), then the internal storage doesn't matter and again this is a rumor and unconfirmed, 3) this is a rumor, plain and simple and see point 2.  Basically, wait till we have confirmation cause I am betting 2 out of 3 of those will be wrong at the very least.  

nothing suggests this will be a $400 device.

3DS had shitty marketing too honestly. It's not like 3DS ads were mind blowing. 

Marketing is overrated, you need to have a genuinely desirable product.

Wii U was ... boring. A screen on the controller? Why not a cup holder too, it'd be about as useful. 

It's basically guaranteed that it will do better than the Wii U

Highly customized Nvidia Tegra suggests a high price.

The name Nvidia also suggests a high price.

I don't think it'll be that expensive.

Even the Shield Console was $199.99 (the no HDD config) and that will be almost 2 years old by the time Switch launches. 

A cheap 6-inch 720p LCD is maybe $50 tops, a battery $10. 

I think it'll be $249.99 launch price. 

But price is not everything. 3DS is what? $79.99 at the lowest and it won't even get to the GBA's total even with double a 6 year cycle almost instead of 3 years. 

I'm skeptical it's all that "customized" either. Probably a Tegra X2 tweaked for game performance and larger L2/L3 cache to help offset low bandwidth from LPDDR4 RAM. 

No, the Shield Tablet & the Shield Console each retail for $199 and have been out for about 1.5 years.

Also, it has been heavily rumored that Nvidia gave Nintendo a really good deal since they have yet to find a major partner to use their Tegra chips and some insiders have said it will be cheaper than we expect.

Nintendo has also acknowledged on multiple occasions that Wii U was more expensive than it should have been, you dont fix that issue by releasing an even more expensive device.

Im very confident in my prediction that Switch will launch at $249.

I came in hoping the OP was "on launch" I'm sad now, I'll leave.

ludicrous, every person who I've talked about in real life who HAD heard of this digs the idea.

Nintendo hasn't even started commercials and marketing it like at all, probably because they're not announcing the details till January. so A) I think you're totally wrong about the popular reception (or lackof) and B) the time to judge that sort of thing would be at minimum when its officially announced and things can be somewhat tracked like preorders

So far everyone I've spoken to who have watched the trailer seem to dig it. Bear in mind the only people who probably are mega aware of the Switch announcement are mostly heavy gamers

casuals won't have an opinion until this thing gets officially announced with details and commercials and things, and make no mistake, the market this aims for is not the traditional hardcore gamer