Nintendo's OS for Wii U was horribly bloated, wasting a colossal 1GB of the system's RAM; hopefully Switch's will be more trim.

so they'd have a section for games like crossy road, angry birds, etc? I honestly can see them doing that. I know angry birds was on the 3ds, but no one(except 6 year old fanatics) would ever pay $30 for it if you can play it on a tablet for free.

bloated...? It seemed pretty simple. Perhaps there were unnecessary things added? Also, keep in mind that the Wii U only has 2 GB of RAM

1GB is ridiculously bloated. The Xbox 360 OS used just 32MB and was as good as Wii U's or better. There's really no excuse for a console OS to be a gig or bigger. 

i honestly didn't know it took up half of the memory until now...

It's so fast, with barely any bloatware. What could possibly make the OS take 1 GB?

Buggered if I know. One of the most confounding things about the system, that fully half of its RAM is taken up by an OS that doesn't seem to justify such a size at all. I sincerely hope Switch doesn't blow 1GB or more of its RAM on the OS.

I hope so.

Perhaps the Wii OS backwards compatibility with Miiverse may have done something to increase the size? Or perhaps just bad management?

either way, I'm hoping for the same thing. I won't care however if it the games aren't impacted(i.e increase the RAM or make games not need too much ram)

It will impact games; if the system has 4GB of RAM as rumoured, then the difference between the OS being 500MB or 1.5 GB of RAM will mean the difference between games having 2.5 or 3.5GB to run on. That will effect things like textures, porting, etc.

An OS made in house by Nintendo.

It is not just the OS that takes the space, but the applications that are supposed to run in the background, and 1GB is the space reserved to, not taken by. My guess would that Miiverse might be the biggest resource hog. The OS, however, is most likely put into hibernate and to be saved in RAM (instead of internal storage) while you play a game, as this could save lots of resources to be used on games, as opposed to just running in the background, as the games do not run on top of the OS anyway.