Yes!

I don't care about more power or anything like that. If they just made a cheaper version without the screen attached I'd be delighted. I don't want to pay extra for something I'm never going to use!

 pfft likely more powerful. Steam Deck is just an old laptop crammed in a smaller form. The Orin chips are better. Even if they don't use the rumored custom T239 Orin Chip and use a more stock Orin chip offer more than Steam Deck does in features alone and if they even use a medium-range Orin SoC it's more powerful than Steam Deck.

You didn't seem to get the point of my post. Scaling performance on an APU that is thermally/power constrained is easy to do without making an entirely new system. 

Any advantage a new system gives could be achieved through the dock enabling higher power profiles via better cooling. Nintendo already has some patents in this direction.

And no, it would be a lot cheaper (and easier) to design a dock that cools the Switch 2 better, and allows you to run it at higher power profile, than to design a whole separate system. For obvious reasons.

Orin is unlikely in my eyes, unless heavily cut down. $449 incoming I reckon, no thanks.

 There are several versions of Orin. No it won't be using the Orin 12 CPU core 32GB of ram but likely would use anything in the 8core 8-16GB of ram range. We know the T239 exists and nothing uses it currently.

If Nintendo goes with Nvidia they don't have a choice but to go with an option more powerful than the Steam Deck. Nvidia has a surplus of Ampere chips. They have stopped producing Volta (which is what came before Ampere for its Tegra line) years ago. They're going use their Ampere chips. Lovelace is a bit too recent, so I don't expect them to go with that, but if they did that would further widen the gap.

But unlike Valve, Nintendo likely will get a good deal on its chips because it is an order of magnitude bigger company and expects to sell far more hardware.

Also I doubt nvda giving any deals now with the stock being worth 1 trillion thanks to ai hype but we'll see.

I doubt they go with nvda again. Nintendo only went with nvda cause Nintendo got a mind blowing deal on the switch chip set cause they were basically useless for nvda .  I honestly don't see Nintendo going with anything cutting edge cause they never do.

This is likely a contract that was made at the latest a year ago. Their stock price this year won't affect it.

The crypto mining boom and silicon shortage could've, but if the pricing agreement came last year after the cryptocurrency bear market started, then Nvidia had an incentive to keep an agreement with Nintendo.