poor comparison between the 3DS and the GBA though, the standard popular version of 3DS still is going for like 180$ I'm pretty sure, and the GBA was 100$ or under for almost its ENTIRE run

in terms of gross $ amount the 3DS has probably surpassed the GBA dramatically in terms of the amount of cash generated simply from hardware sales. the 2DS sales are a very small fraction of total 3DS sales, Nintendo seemed to give up a while ago on it given how poor its done (at least in the West). I actually am uncertain if I've ever seen someone in the wild using a 2DS. 3DS's regularly though

people do need to consider that this will A) be by far the most powerful dedicated handheld system yet and B) will have multi function abilities with the home TV docking situation.

To expect this to launch at possibly like 50/60$ over where the 3DS has been its entire lifetime is pretty absurd. A safe bet for the Switch release price will be 299$, in fact I'd be willing to bet that's where it lands. and perfectly reasonable in my eyes. Bear in mind the Wii U has been at like 300$ its entire lifetime and the Switch appears to potentially hold a LOT more value

It's possible the Switch MIGHT struggle to sell ~10 mil units in its first year on the market... lifetime however it will more than easily blow past not only 10 mil but the Wii U's LTD numbers as well, and will most likely accomplish that within 2 years on the market.

Do not worry, the thing will sell fine. It is looking good already and it will only get better.

People really underrate the GBA's sales. There's a very good chance Nintendo never has any type of hardware that sells GBA numbers again and the fact that it only had really about 3 1/2 years before its successor came out makes that number all the more impressive. 

Nintendo can price Switch at $299.99 .... I wouldn't be surprised, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have problems selling in April/May/June at that price once the launch interest wears off. 

I think it will sell around Gamecube/N64 levels or less unless they can manage to get major AAA multiplats AND they aren't obviously crippled vs the bigtime entrenched Sony+MS ecosystems AND have good online system AND be priced under $299.

The odds are pretty slim.

Comparing price/value to Wii U is dubious because the Wii U was an UTTER failure at that price/value.
Simply doing marginally better is not a viable plan there. 
To make maximum benefit of combined handheld/console market, Nintendo wants to maximize sales,
not milk the smaller portion of the market that is absolutely smitten by the hybrid concept,
they also want to appeal to those for whom only one use-case will be realistically used 99% of the time.

Swapping out the GPU component for new generation GPU cores is the most notable customization noted so far.
Tweaks like you suggest are plausible, we could see specific cores tweaked for purpose e.g. A57 for OS? But GPU seems biggest IMHO.

I think you underestimate how big Pokemon is, and how big of a difference TPC is compared to Nintendo in terms of marketing. Look at Pokemon20 compared to literally any other Nintendo anniversary ever for reference.

The rumor isn't that there will only be 16GB cards, it's that that's the recommended standard. The issue with that is what that implies for cart prices. 2GB was the recommended standard for 3DS cards, even though games could use 4GB and 8GB carts if they wanted. You know why games rarely used 4GB carts or higher? Because they were too expensive to manufacture. 2GB let devs sit comfortably at $40. 4GB made Capcom want to raise the price of ResiRev to $50. They didn't and ate the cost because people complained. They never released the sequel on the 3DS. I wonder why.

The reason 16GB is an issue is because that's probably the break even point for a $60 Switch game. Anymore, and devs have to either eat the costs internally (which Nintendo doesn't need to worry about because it's their platform), or charge more for their games. If a 16GB game is $60, how much will a 32GB game be? $70? What about 64GB? $85? God forbid a game is bigger than that. Infinite Warfare was 130GB. It's not like that's going to install onto 32GB of internal memory. Are they going to squeeze that onto a 128GB cart? What's that going to be? $100? When making a game of the same size on the PS4/XBO costs pennies on the dollar because disks are so much cheaper? You think that's crazy, but $128GB carts are going for $40 rn. Obviously there's a discrepency because it's a consumer product vs a manufacturer's product, but how much discrepancy can there be with a $39 price difference? This is a problem because, no matter what anyone wants to believe, this is NOT a handheld. It is a CONSOLE, being marketed at a CONSLOLE audience with CONSOLE quality games. Those games are bigger than handheld games and cost more than handheld games and Nintendo seems to have built hardware that doesn't comprehend that. If they did, it would not have used cartridges. Or it would have but would've given the Switch an insane amount of internal memory to compensate, because external memory of a large enough size won't be affordable in an SD card form factor for years. Right now, a 512GB micro SD card is $309.

People are in this honeymoon daze about the magic of cartridges, and the reality is they are just as much of a 3rd party killer now as they were on the N64. Short of Nintendo giving third parties a MASSIVE manufacturing break, this is a very real issue that will detrementally effect the games they get.

And these rumors come from the same people who leaked the Switch in the first place. It's time to stop pretending they don't know what they're talking about when we know that they do.

^^ That's a common misconception about carts. Carts aren't stored on the type of flash memory cells that are in SD Cards. Carts are etched in a printing process that is ridiculously cheap by comparison. I called this far in advance as a feasible option anyway :

http://playeressence.com/what-are-the-chances-nintendo-ditches-optical-media-next-gen-goes-with-high-capacity-cards-vote-below/

It's an easy mistake to make, because people are very familiar with the SD cards, but that's not what the DS/3DS/etc use for retail games. Mask Roms. They also have the benefit of lasting far longer than flash memory, and are more reliable. Minuses : not rewritable.

Wow...just...what?  Tell that to Activision - Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, pretty much 70% of the AAA games industry that have been thriving on the hype machine of powerhouse marketing for years now.  If you think marketing is overrated, you are seriously out of touch.  Obviously you need a product that can be *presented* as desirable, but the Wii U had that.  It was well within the ability to spin as something desirable.  Nintendo just failed utterly.

And the 3DS didn't have amazing marketing but it was informative, fairly wide spread, highlighted the growing backlog well, and was usually not repulsively embarrassing.  The Wii U's marketing was in orders of magnitude *worse*.  At times it was just a couple steps up from the original Earthbound campaign.  And more importantly, it only got marketing on rare occassions.  Whether you think marketing is important or not (it is), one universal truth is that customers can't buy a product they don't know exists.  

Oh, and a touchscreen had immense potential to augment and evolve the conventional controller in a meaningful way.  Problem is Nintendo 1) shoved the Wii U out when it was clearly not ready (seriously, the current gamepad SCREAMS prototype design) and 2) Nintendo never committed to pursuing a meaningful evolution and instead bounced back and forth between meaningless gimmicks and basically not using it at all.  Shame really.  

Too early to say, games sell consoles