Also a big factor in its performance level is how it switches between the low power 150 gflops and 384 gflops modes on the fly. This isn't normal for consoles and clearly the Switch does it instantly on the fly. From all accounts the Switch doesn't fully utilise that 384 gflops at all but instead just uses the performance boost to either upscale or anti-alias. I've not heard of any games currently that load higher quality graphic assets when you dock the Switch and with the very low 25.6GB/s memory bandwidth I think the docked mode is more bottlenecked.

The figure of 384 gflops may not be realistic at all because most of that performance is untapped so the console can instantly switch to portable mode without having to reload the game. I.e. 2 graphic output drivers a bit like a pc connected to 2 screens but toggles between each display.

If the Switch cpu performance is 16,000-18,000 mips but one cpu core is completely taken for the operating system then we are left with 12,000-13,000 mips in cpu performance, easily much better than wii u but still very much behind xbox 360 and ps3. The ps3 with the dual thread power pc main chip plus the 7 cell processors is something ridiculous like 35,000-40,000 mips, the 360 is 20,000 mips I think. The ps3 loses one cell processor for the operating system and the 360 one of its six threads so I guess the 360 drops to 17,000 mips and the ps3 maybe 32-35,000 mips. Both ps4 and xbox one never pushed the envelope when it came to cpu performance and are around 38-45,000 mips and again one of the 8 cpu's is used for the operating system.

I've said it many times but Skyrim will be a good guide to Switch performance. It's a game on many systems with fairly high demands especially the cpu. It will be interesting to see how the Switch copes. We have seen the Tegra Shield box fail to run good versions of pc ports and that is 2x the cpu power of Switch and I guess 3x the gpu because it does't have to run at a low power portable mode.

Personally I think the Switch will struggle with some 360 and ps3 conversions because of low cpu resources. It isn't as bad as wii u but it is only slightly better.

However the Switch does have a gpu feature set much more advanced than 360 and ps3 and so can achieve new effects and do some functions more efficiently. Tile based rendering assists greatly and makes better use of limited memory bandwidth.

There is no doubt that Switch is a very powerful portable gaming system but also a very weak home console. A large percentage of games do not push the hardware of ps4 or xbox one and for such games the Switch can have comparable if slightly weaker versions.

It's exaggerated I would say. The switch is far closer to xbone than Wii U at this point and with engines like unreal 4 and developers claiming time and again the ease of portability unless you count really intensive games almost all games can be ported to switch at not that much hassle if the developers are serious about it. I mean how long did it take for snake pass to be ported? Two months or something?

The question has not been answered because no one needs to ask it. You just need to ask yourself if you want to play 3rd party games or not and then if you want to play Nintendo games or not. And then you choose PC because it has everything.

Yes, emulate. How criminal. Frankly PC gamers need to stop stealing games and actually buy their damn games. 

Definitely easy to port games too from what has been written from many sources but that doesn't mean it can port more ambitious games if those games need a more powerful gpu or more cpu resources.

It's always a false direction to compare first party titles. You could only compare them if GG for example would have to make a game (or even the same) on the Switch in that example.

How would Uncharted look if it was ND coding for 360 or Xbone? We don't know and we will never know because you can't really compare them. Different team, different talent, different emphasis on how to make a game.

3gb vs 5.5gb (ram usable for games) is what's going to kill Switch's chances of getting games like Witcher 3 or the next Elderscrolls/Fallout, regardless of the GPU/CPU deficit.

There is a big difference in power, and when a big third party title launches on both Switch and PS4 the difference will be very apparent.

You pay a price for portability.

Just read the bolded part

You cannot really compare the power of different devices. Especially with different architectures. If you put benchmarks on systems (which is possible on PC, but on consoles we cannot load own programs and the makers never tell us such stuff), you see that there are different stuff. Maybe integer operations run on one machine better than on the other, but for floating point it is different. Maybe one benchmark performs badly, but if you reorder commands it goes much better. Basically you have areas like: integer, floating point, memory bandwith, transfer data to graphic memory, shaders, ... In each of the areas the performance can vary from other areas, so  machine A performs better on one area, machine B on the other. But seeing how much difference it even makes if you compile a code with one compiler and then with another - you can always say this benchmark is putting one machine at disadvantage. So don't expect 'exactly'.

This. The Switch is weaker, how much is and will be ever unclear. But it is stronger than every handheld before too. And it can play the same game on TV and on the go. Most customers will probably not compare fine differences in graphics, they will ask if the platform has the game they wanna play and if they can play it together with their friends online (which means they need the same platform).