But almost every dev other than Nintendo employs AA on pretty much all hardware from Xbox 360 upwards, even in 60fps games like COD.

COD games were usually sub-HD on the last gen HD twins so the teams at Activision traded in resolution for framerate and some anti-aliasing ... 

Again, games make these different trade-offs all the time ...

I'm aware that graphics are about tradeoffs, but no AA is a severe tradeoff. The vast majority of games on 360-or-better hardware use some form of it. Even a simple and cheap post-process solution like the one used in 3D World/Captain Toad would have made Mario Kart 8 look much better.

To be fair CoD didn't always maintain 60fps last gen though, it would often drop down to the low 40's.
On the Xbox 360 CoD would usually employ 2x MSAA, which helps make up for the resolution deficit.

I would personally rather 2x cheap AA than nothing at all, even if the resolution is slightly decreased to make up for that.
CoD would run at 960x544 on the PS3 and 1040x608 on the 360, so it was far from being "HD" but still looked acceptable because there was at-least some AA.

If you had a Switch game with a native resolution of 1280x720. I would be happy if they cut back on the resolution so it was 1024x576 but then throw more AA at the problem.
The goal is to make a terrible resolution like 720P look it's best.

I'm not forgetting it. But you can hardly put out a specific number for color compression.

And, i was just refering to RAM config and bandwidth and what it might tell about the amount of RAM.

It should be obvious though that handling resources well is a key element.

That's what people have to understand if referring to GFLOP/s or GB/s that it's at least as much about efficiency as raw numbers.

But we do have a round-a-bout guestimate thanks to Anandtech.
25% for Maxwell. 20% for Pascal.

2GB is the same amount Wii U had. You'd think for a more powerful system, more RAM would be helpful.

Then again it's Nintendo, they do often cut corners.

Thing is, RAM is cheap. Those 2GB DDR3 already where cheap back then. And, Wii U's weakspot was the CPU.
Never understood why they didn't go with a quadcore and maybe a higher clock.
PPC750 architecture was never intended for high core clocks, but up to 1.6GHz seems quite reasonable as well.
That would have been 30-70% moreCPU power depending on how well a game scales with more cores.

You have gone totally over the top with the claim effiiciency improvements and we are already getting a good idea of the Switch performance level by what we have seen. There are compromises made with mobility chipsets. It certainly looks like the docked performance boost for the gpu is just going to be resolution and the core game is just going to be based on portable performance rather than any effort to make 2 distinct modes and perhaps cartridge sizes will dictate this.

I've a feeling once the hype dies down we may see that indeed the humble wii u actually can perform to a higher level than Switch in some areas. That 70GB/s 32MB of edram memory which gave the wii u a significant performance boost graphically may actually help deliver some surprises against the shared memory of Switch with more minimal cache memory. 

It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds again. Most people are saying how much better Zelda looks on Switch but as some detailed comparisons have shown its not all one way there are advantages on the wii u too some big advantages with lighting effects and shadows. Whether this continues to the final retail games is uncertain.

I still believe in the Eurogamer spec based on the speech to developers rather than the Foxconn leak that could be stress tests etc while manufacturing. Certainly looking at the performance of many games it almost feels like the eurogamer spec is too high and perhaps the max mhz of the gpu while docked will be lower at retail.

Surely its in Nintendo's interest to impress us with the games on a technical level but most look so poor and are struggling to show distance between the wii u. It really feels like there is a bad surprise coming with regard performance with the Switch. Worse even than are current already low expectations. 

No the original design was 2GB only the developer versions were 4GB but then it was stated 4GB was expected for retail versions.

http://www.idigitaltimes.com/nintendo-switch-ram-specs-leaked-insider-say-more-ram-wii-u-565975

If this March launch is a soft launch just to milk early adopters and they always planned for a signficant price drop later then a lower price for manufacturing of 2GB will clearly help to maintain a profit margin. Clearly it would never be as cheap to make 4GB compared to 2GB in reality you have to pay more and RAM is always a signficant cost on a logic board after the main chipset or even sometimes above it.

Knowing the surprises that have come out in the past with Nintendo products this wouldn't surprise me. I'm not saying it isn't 4GB but as Nintendo decisions go making the Switch 2GB doesn't seem a particularly bad one especially when your actual games come on cartridges anyway its not like its directly comparable to a console with an optical drive.

I would of thought it quite rare for a development kit and final retail hardware to have the same memory capacity. Makes optimising games to use all memory difficult if you have other background resources due to game development also taking memory.