It makes sense too if you actually look at battery life and look at what battery types/sizes are available and how much electricity we know a Tegra X1 consumes at max load. 

If Nintendo is using a decent sized battery (6000 MaH) you're only going to get about 3 hours max from that sucker if your chip + screen is consuming 6.5 watts.

There's just no magical Nintendium technology or something that can change that, battery technology is stuck in the stone age and is a massive limiting factor, there's only so much you can get from 5 watts of electricity, the Wii U consumes 33 watts, so if Switch is running the same graphics at 5 watts on battery power ... that's impressive.  

They can advertise it as a family car it still doesn't change his point because as far as portable platforms go the is only one choice people have after Vita and 3DS, the marketing is a tactical approach as they're marketing it more as a portable device that can compare with home platforms. This gives it a more cutting edge appeal for those coming from 3DS and Vita as the jump from those devices is huge, connecting to a TV doesn't really mean competing with MS and Sony as PCs can connect to TVs as well.

Sorry I can't see the logic in this. The Wii U came out when the PS360 was out and was still bombing then and getting ports.  How powerful it was seemed to have very little to do with it, and the ports it was getting weren't flying off the shelves either.

The Wii U had a lot more problems than power. Not to mention the DS and WIi success, but I'm sure people will write that off as 'fad', but probably conveniently ignore the Gamecube, or seemingly forget that the SNES and NES were outclassed by far superior hardware in their time as well.

This thread just gets better and better...

Half Life 2, Portal 2, Bioshock, Resident Evil 5, Doom 3 not enough?

The issue is the controllers. Or lack there-of. You can't just take an FPS like Overwatch and whack it on a touch screen and wish everyone "Good Luck".

Plus there are a massive amount of mobile handsets that are low-end still using ARM A7 or such CPU cores with 1Gb of Ram equipped with a pathetic Mali 400 GPU.

I think you are overblowing the situation to much.

* The CPU in the Switch had it's clockrate reduced by 900mhz~. - The CPU is responsible for a large % of power consumption and heat.
* The Switch has a fan to aid cooling.
* They could build the chip at 16nm/14nm Finfet instead of 20nm Planar.
* Switch has a smaller, Lower Resolution, Lower powered screen.
* Has a larger Z depth for larger battery.
* Even Thermal throttled the Google Pixel C is faster than the Switch.
* Flagship handsets not only have more power than the Switch, but also don't thermal throttle to a similar degree.

Ergo. There is zero reason for the Switch having the limitations that it has.

The Macbook Pro is using hardware that is orders-of-magnitude faster and more power hungry than the Switch. Not an accurate representation.

Total platform power consumption is typically more important than what the SoC might use. Intel hammered this point home with Medfield.
You could take any flagship SoC out of a Phone and whack it into a Tablet and power consumption would be higher than the phone. There is a fundamental reason for this.

Based on what?
P=V*I, then  5*3.7=18.5W (Assuming as Lipo's are typically 3.7v.)

Now Anandtech did some testing and the GPU in the Tegra X1 by itself was using 1.51w by itself.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8811/nvidia-tegra-x1-preview/3

Thus to power just the GPU you are looking at 12.25 hours.

nVidia's Jetson platform, powered by Tegra was recorded to be using 5.7w of power under a full Cuda load, which is 3.2 hours.

But this ignores everything I laid above with the smaller, lower resolution more energy efficient screen, 900mhz of the clockrate shaved off the CPU and more.
There is no reason for Nintendo to castrate the SoC to this degree other than costs, especially if it's battery life is still not at a minimum of 5-10 hours.

Shield TV is also using a CPU that is twice as fast as the Switch.

It is also using faster, more power hungry DRAM.

Power consumption was recorded at the wall, so if the PSU is only 80% efficient, that alone could account for several watts of power consumption as well. (It's not unheard of having PSU's that are 60% efficient.)

Apples to Apples.

That isn't what we are saying.

And this is where you loose any credability.
Power consumption doesn't work like that.

What if I told you, that the Switch could use more power than the Shield TV? Voltage has a direct relationship with power consumption and heat.

If you bin your chips better you can use chips which have better power characteristics to hit lower voltages, so you can have faster chips that use less power.  Nintendo tends to be "cheap" on it's hardware components since the Wii era, they are likely not aggressively binning.

No. It is not the only choice.

And yes. It is competing with the Playstation, Xbox and PC.

Whilst the SNES and NES had competitors who could beat Nintendo in the hardware stakes... It wasn't a generational difference.
The SNES most certainly held it's own with the likes of StarFox, Mario Kart and SGI pre-rendered games like Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong.

Just going to post my 2 cents before the big event tonight. Bare minimum the Switch needs to cost $250 with a physical copy BotW pack in, and have a four hour battery life. Anybody can pick up an Xbox One for $300 with Battlefield One. Handheld or not, Nintendo needs to undercut the competition by at least fifty dollars. A $300 Switch spells disaster for Nintendo. The best price we could possibly hope for is $229.99 with BotW packed in, but I know that's got around 5% chance of happening.

Breath of the Wild will not be a pack-in unless its a more expensive limited edition bundle, no way it will be bundled with the standard sku.

I think the rumors of $250 for basic sku and $300 for premium sku with more storage and Splatoon will be accurate.

You still owe us those 2 cents ;)

At $250 for a basic sku, we have a choice between $310 for a Switch and a game, or $300 for a PS4/XB1 and a game. Nintendo winds up costing more, and being less powerful. Maybe $250 for a sku with Splatoon packed in? Do you think that would be feasable for Nintendo?