For a home console yes, for a Nintendo portable ... that's getting a little dicey, especially since the attach ratio (software sold) on a portable is generally well below a console. 8-9 million in peak years also likely means 4-5 million in lesser years so you're flirting with going under 40 million in that case. 

If by pleny of people you mean the same people who bought a Wii U, sure (minus that chunk of Wii U buyers who were so upset with Nintendo over the system that they won't be coming back, which I'd say is probably a 20%-30% chunk of that).  

As a home console, it's functionality is fairly poor and it doesn't have the price benefit either, PS4/XB1 will be $250, maybe even $199.99 by next year with thousands of games available, I don't really think the same sales pitch of "well we got Mario and Zelda" is going to seriously be a game changer in that sense. 

Switch is going to need to hold that 3DS base, and even that I think Nintendo is in for a tough challenge there. 

There's no Wiimote miracle coming to bail out the fact that it's a fairly mediocre proposition console wise, terrific Nintendo games notwithstanding but every Nintendo console has terrific Nintendo games. 

OK, putting aside Nintendo franchises, for $199.99-$249.99 what proposition from a games perspective does a Switch offer above/beyond a PS4 or XBox 1 both of which will have thousands of games just as the Switch is getting it's 25 games?

You can't use the Wii thing, there is no Wiimote "hook" here, if there was Nintendo would've made it front and center the focus of the machine from day 1. 

I didn't like the Wii but I did predict it would do very well on the market, there was a clear hook there and a clear audience that was under-served and a completely different way of playing. Switch doesn't have any of that. 

The 3DS base has to be the one that shows up to this party, because it's not a very appealling party to other people who don't really life/eat/sleep Nintendo franchises. There is no $600 PS3 to take advantage of here either, as I said by giving Sony/MS almost 4 years to get their costs down, both of those systems could be $199.99 next year. 

finally someone that applies logical thinking to the Switch.

People's arguments that the Switch will sell like hotcakes because "it's amazing because it's both a handheld and a portable and a hybrid", so switch sales=3ds sales+WiiUsales+hybridsales" , and "it will have mario zelda, pokemon etc"...

Like you I don't see it at all, putting both market onto one device's shoulders. Putting it up against  everything else (mobile, PC, xbox, playstation) is a risky proposition

I believed in the "hybride" ecosystem, with two devices completing each other, one being a powerful home console and the other being a handheld, sharing games, OS, architecture. 

But one handheld that you plugged into a TV, and that you label a home console and therefore make it underpowered in front of the Xbox and PS4... I can't believe that this is Nintendo end strategy.

The more time pass the more I think they have something else brewing in their R&D department, maybe a device more in line with the mobile market.

There is strategy there, you just may not like it. 

By effectively making their two hardware lines into one, Nintendo can now sell the games they spend the most time/money developing (the Splatoons, Breath of the Wilds, of the world) to 80-85% of their audience that doesn't want a Nintendo console unless it has a Wiimote like lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon. 

Even Nintendo's own fans voted with their wallets and have largely said no to any Nintendo console after the Super NES era and opted instead to buy the handheld only. 

So it was a problem for Nintendo when you are spending the majority of your time and money making games for the minority of your audience. That doesn't make sense. Imagine McDonalds saying they're only going to sell Big Macs to 20% of their restaurants and if you want a Big Mac you must drive to those select locations. 

Beyond that Nintendo just couldn't support two distinct platforms any longer, not with the portable side coming up to PS3/360 tier visuals ... something has to give, that's way too much development resources for two different platforms for any company to realistically bear. Sony/MS wouldn't be able to do it either. 

So in the end I don't even think there was much of a choice for Nintendo in the matter, the Switch approach was really the only realistic way to continue. 

Fairly doubtful they have some kind of amazing hook that would sell tens of millions of systems and they would chose to not show it while showing the sysem being played in about 6 different configurations first. That doesn't really make a lot of sense, if they had that, I doubt the system would even be called "Switch", because they'd build/brand the system around that cool feature. 

"Switch" is the name, because that's the main unique feature of the system, that's for better or worse the best they could up with after 5 years. 

It will do well enough I think but mainly with the 3DS base Nintendo has already established (y'know where 85% of Nintendo's fanbase actually is). 

As a console, it's not really going to be IMO the console of choice for most people who really are crazy about home consoles. It's a fairly compromised product without any big advantage in pricing or software library, there's just not a whole lot of compelling reasons to use the Switch as your main home console over a PS4 or XB1 other than the usual "but it has Mario/Zelda/DK/etc". That hasn't won the day alone for Nintendo in the past. 

If you want to believe this is the next Wii, that's fine, but I don't really think so. There's no new, compeletely different way to play here that's going to magically bring forth an untapped audience that currently does not games and would need a Switch in order to enjoy any type of gaming. 

Well of course the fusion of handheld and console development was a logical way to go, but that's not where is the problem.

Like I said in my previous comment, you can create an ecosystem of devices, that tends to different demographic and consumers needs and still put the same games on each devices. That is what apple, and google are doing, and it works very well. And that is also the strategy Microsoft is going with with Windows 10 (PC, One S, Scorpio).

Here like you said, there is only the Switch, a console that tries to please everybody, but you can't please everybody with one device, you just end up pleasing nobody.

So yeah Nintendo will sell the same games to the handheld and the home system crowd under one roof, but that doesn't mean they'll sell more. Take for example Smash Bros, sold on 2 systems, 13 million games sold, with at the time 50 millions 3DS and 10 millions WiiU in the wild. If the Switch, like you say, sells less than the 3DS, then where will they sell more games? To whom?

A strategy like the Switch can only mean a decrease in market share and game sales for Nintendo. Now yes, the reducing in costs of having 2 separate systems will be beneficial, but I doubt Nintendo's plan is to have a smaller place in the market.

The problem with that is a portable has to be a central component and as such, it's not so easy to scale games as people think. 

Windows plays well with other Windows platforms, but most laptops will die in like an hour or two if you try playing a hardcore 3D game on them (provided they can even run them in the first place). 

Having the same game play on a 5 watt device and a 50 watt device and actually utilizing both platforms well is a tough task. 

The iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch have a shared ecosystem sure, and they're different devices, but it's also true that it's not like you can play Uncharted 4 on the iPad while the iPhone is running that game at half res. No, those devices are all fairly close in power. 

And I think Nintendo probably will have different versions of Switch like that, but if you're saying "well why can't I have a Switch console that's 2.5 TFLOP, and the people who want the portable can just have the portable".

No. 

It doesn't work like that, games can only scale so far, as matter of fact I think this is why the docked version of the Switch is even underclocked. There isn't really any big reason why the docked Switch shouldn't run at full clock (1 GHz = 500 GFLOPS), but I think they had to down clock it to 768 MHz (384 GFLOPS approx) because the gap would be too hard to have the same game for the docked and undocked mode if the gap in performance was any larger than the 2.5:1 ratio Nintendo apparently settled on. 

Nope because people buy consoles because of the games! I am hype for:

- Spla2oon
- Zelda
- New Animal Crossing
- New FE
- New Pokemon
- New Mario

Of course it's work, but it's a lot less work than porting a WiiU game on 3DS.  You don't have to start from scratch to rebuild the game.

I will always think that the extra costs is nothing in comparison to having two devices instead of one. They could have easily used the full capacity of the tegra, even push it to ore than 1 Tflops and 8 GB of ram, so that they could have the same architecture but something on par with the Xbox One.

They could have sold more devices, the Switch handheld would have been a handheld instead of a hybrid, making it a real successor to the 3DS and having only the mobile market as a competitor.

And the switch home would have been a cost effective solution to compete in the home console market, it would have live off the back f the handheld, and could have easily received ports of third parties AAA

That's a way better solution if Nintendo's strategy is to actually increase their market shares.

Mark my words, the Switch will sell less than the 3DS, and it will not be the only device Nintendo releases during the next 2-3 years