This is a whole lot of nothing sandwich. How much consoles did Nintendo sell when the 64(or whatever this 1995 launch is) launched in the US?

Very impressive, though excluding Wii Sports is pretty big :p

Total sales in launch calendar year:
Nintendo 64 (September 1996): 1,771,791
Game Boy Advance (June 2001): 4,746,422
GameCube (November 2001): 1,236,059
Nintendo DS (November 2004): 1,200,000
Wii (November 2006): 1,080,000
Nintendo 3DS (March 2011): 4,112,000
Wii U (November 2012):  890,000

So they're just saying it will sell more units per year than other hardware? That's pretty obvious...

They're saying it'll sell more software than any of these consoles, not hardware. It's uncertain if Switch hardware will sell more than 3DS's 2011, and there's no way Switch will sell more than GBA's 2001.

Though it's still obvious that Switch will sell more software, since Switch has a home-console attach rate and the only consoles that are competitive in terms of HW in the first calendar year are handhelds with much lower attach rates.

Well the wii was released in late november of it's launch year and the switch at the start of march so you are comparing one month of software sales to ten months so the switch launch year of 2017 will easily beat the wii's 2006.

Calendar year? Well, that explains it.

GameCube outsold the Wii in basically the same period. Nintendo for sure undershipped the fuck outta that thing, lol. 1.77 mill N64s in basically three months is not bad, not bad at all especially for 1996, that must've been a record for any game hardware at that time and would still be a healthy number today. 

What did the PS1 sell in 3 months? Not trying to make a point, I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if it was lower due to the PS1 being a new company system. What about SNES though? That probably sold more in it's first 3 months. 

Also 1.77 mil would be terrible by todays standards. Xbox One sold like 2.4 mil in two months

Edit : I was wrong. Xbox One actually sold 3 million by the end of 2013. So roughly half of Xbox One numbers ...

there is a point to be made here:
even if the switch sells less hardware, if it sells more software , its a positive for ninty. after all all the money comes from licencing and thier own games (which are the bulk of software sales anyway)