It's big.LITTLE configuration for the purpose of being able to switch between 4 lower performing cores for 4 higher performing cores ... 

Yes - I'm basing the 26GB/s off of Tegra's X1 and I don't know what the actual NS will use. However, if the shield used the X1, I highly doubt the NS will end up being lower powered than the shield. I expect all changes they made to be a better SOC.

Yes, the fan as been known for quite some time now and patents from today confirm that it is in the console and how it works. The dock is just plastic and connectors, that Nintendo has verbally confirmed.

The micro-console you're referring to will be lower powered than NS. Nintendo is not going to launch something equal/lower than that. This new Tegra chip may be Maxwell, but it will be more powerful than the X1. I think you won't change your mind regardless of what is read as you can't even accept it has an active cooling mechanism. 

No one is expecting parity. No one is expecting 4K gaming. But this is not Wii 3. This is not a console that is apples to oranges in technical capability. It will come with middleware support from all of the major companies day one. I'm expecting to see all major annual releases announced for in in 2017. Many in January and rest by E3. I then expect, as NS has solid consumer support, that games currently too far into development to get support to be announced. (there is a reason R* always does two major consoles then PC later, its how they plan their resources, they won't create a new team that they have no resourcing for to do NS if it wasn't already in the initial planning... which it likely wasn't for RDR2 as an example)

Yes, and? The Jaguar is more equivalent with the 4 lower cores of X1.

The 7th core is not 100% for games. It is also used for other tasks.

Flops is a pointless metric, it has no direct relationship with power consumption.

It has about half the capability of the Xbox One, even if the specs tell us it's even less than that. - Maxwell does have an efficiency edge over Graphics Core Next.
And Denver is nothing to sneeze at.
With that in mind, there is diminishing returns everytime you double your graphics quality, so the Switch should be able to seem like it can get close enough to the Xbox One if it maintains a moderate resolution.

The Wii U is closer to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, it usually has better lighting and texturing thanks to the better GPU and more memory though.

Nintendo doesn't really make graphical-powerhouse games on underpowered hardware.
Nintendo gets away with what it does because the models it uses are fairly light on polys and don't need things like subsurface scattering, tessellation and tons of mapping and shader effects.

Nintendo do have some amazing art direction though, even low-quality assets seem to seamlessly fit in, mostly thanks to the fact Nintendo doesn't push for realism. - That's a good thing, it gets me excited to see what they can do with more modern hardware capabilities.

Depends on how successfull the hardware is.

If it's a runaway success, then developers will likely take notice and port more games.
I'm hoping Nintendo releases a version of the switch one day, that ditches all the mobile stuff, but retains the same game library etc'.

The Atom X7 z8700 should be able to beat the Tegra in most CPU tasks, but Tegra should win in GPU tasks, no question. - Anandtech seems to back that up when comparing Surface to Shield.

But we need to put these chips into perspective, they are low-end chips by PC standards.

Arguably? Nah. It most certainly *is* more advanced.
Maxwell is an amazing microarchitecture, Pascal just refined it and took advantage of clock room.

But can it beat a GPU when developers are building games to take advantage of the various strength's and weakness's of Graphics Core Next? We know that there are a few edge cases where nVidia hardware tends to fold and AMD's hardware, shines. - How will that translate on the Switch remains to be seen.

Links? Intrigued. I would guess that a Quad-core arrangement of A57's would beat a Quad-core arrangement of Jaguar.
However... Jaguar isn't arranged in a Quad-core configuration in the consoles.
8x Jaguar Cores should be roughly equivalent to a Haswell Dual-Core running at 3ghz, which places it faster than Core M which in-turn beats out Tegra in CPU tasks.

Plus the Xbox One has a larger CPU performance edge than the 9% clock advantage entails when compared to the PS4 thanks to the eSRAM and DDR3 memory subsystem (Aka. Lower latency) which has translated to real-world gains.
Not only that but the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One S as well as Scorpio take it up a notch again.

No it's not.
Just because it is based on DDR4 technology... Doesn't make it better than DDR3.

DDR1 can be faster than GDDR5, it depends how wide you wish to take it, The Xbox One has a significantly wider memory bus than the switch could ever possibly hope to have and thus has the advantage by default.

As for the PC... You forget that  games use the GPU memory PLUS the system memory. You can't just take a 2Gb GPU and think the entire game is run on that... It doesn't. Often games will take Gigabytes of System memory as well.

Also PS4 has GDDR5. Not GDDR4.

The Switch is held back by it's memory sub-system, it is the weakest part of it IMHO.

Nintendo won't be tweaking anything. They aren't allowed to unless they have a license.
They can only "suggest" things to nVidia.

Same goes for Microsoft and Sony, they aren't allowed to look at the chips that power those consoles, only make suggestions.

Nope. Big.Little.
Atom X7 z8700 can give Tegra a good run for it's money anyway.
An Atom x7 Z8700 verses an 8-core Jaguar with a Radeon 7770 GPU would bend over the Atom and call it sally. No contest. Not even in the same league.

Patents =/= Final product ... 

No it isn't LOL ... (That thing is literally a beast compared to the NS. It's a supercharged Tegra X1 that happily sips up as much power as it wants from the wall all the while requiring active cooling. That thing struggled with last gen ports EVEN with the GPU clocked at 1GHz!) 

And I'm not expecting parity or 4K but I'm also not expecting it to run native current gen AAA console ports even with lower presets. NS needs a specialized versions of these games if it hopes to be able to run these blockbusters ... (If the Switch did get the said AAA console titles I'd expect them to look AND play drastically differently. 20/30FPS, less enemies, simpler AI, including different level design too) 

It's going to be Hyrule Warriors WII U vs 3DS and FF Type-0 HD twins vs PSP all over again if the Switch does manage to get these console titles ... (COD will also be 30FPS on the Swtich too.)

Superchunk is clearly a fan of Nintendo products and for the moment the Switch spec looks very unrealistic with the Denver cores still mentioned which were not in the development kit.

Not much point debating with him at this point he seems determined to keep to an overly rosy version of the Switch spec. I disagree with him about this because it gives false expectations to a lot of people but ultimately we don't have the hard evidence yet to set in stone a realistic spec but I do feel currently its mis-judged to say the least.

Some GCN optimizations could potentially hurt Nvidia's microachitecture ... (Tons of asymmetries when we're talking about GPU microachitecture.) 

Shading language optimizations will also be different too. Shader model 6 is a perfect fit for GCN but I wonder what will happen to the Switch's performance as developers start doing these very hardcore shader optimizations you see on GCN ... 

You are setting yourself up for disappointment.

Maybe I'm missing something but Nintendo switch makes no sense to me. It has no harddrive which mean all games must sell through retail. This will kill the indie game market and make this console totally depended on the big game studios.

But the console is to weak for AAA games. If NS has 500 gigaflops and 25gb memory bandwidth there is just no way any gamedeveloper wanna waste time with this console. It needs a minimun 750 gigaflops and 50gb of memory bandwidth to even have a small chance for support.

Wii U -> 352 GFlops. The table is wrong.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1903/wii-u-gpu