Vita got some PS3/360 ports like Mortal Kombat & Borderlands 2 (Mortal Kombat 1 & Borderlands 3 were some of Switch’s biggest 3rd party releases this year).

If Vita was a successful platform, let’s say it sold like PSP, than it would have probably gotten some other “impossible ports” just like if Switch sold like Vita, than PS4/XBO ports would have probably ended shortly after Doom.

Technically it is. Nintendo doesn't actually mandate developers support all play modes of the Switch. Every Switch game has a chart listing compatible modes on either the back of the box or the eShop description. There are a handful of Switch games that don't support handheld mode for example (though most of those are motion control focused). So theoretically, a game can just only support TV Mode. But nearly all Switch games generally support the undocked modes anyway since that's the whole point of the system.

I remember after E3 2012 when many people on this forum thought the Wii U would do amazing because of its appeal to Hardcore and Casual. Then the sale numbers came out, and we found out it appealed to no one but hardcore Nintendo fans. (Actually, it didn't even do that right. I didn't get one until 2015.)

There are many theories on why it failed. But I can say the Switch succeeded because Nintendo made a system to appeal to all their young, old, and new fans. They also cheated by combining two systems into one.

The big thing was the combined software ecosystem, they had a hard time fully supporting both their hardware lines during the GBA/GC & DS/Wii days when they were mostly 2D games on handhelds and SD on consoles but it got especially hard with 3DS/Wii U when they made the jump from 2D to 3D games for the handhelds and SD to HD development for consoles.

Supporting one platform rather than two (sometimes 3 or 4 during the transition period between generations) means you can release a smaller amount of total games while still feeling like the output is higher, reduces the number of redundant titles & allows developers to take their time and make more ambitious, creative games.

As for 3rd party support, 3DS, Wii U and Vita (I consider Switch a spiritual successor to this) individually had many holes in their lineups but if you combine them than they had pretty solid 3rd party support in terms of quantity, quality & variety. For the most part, Switch’s 3rd party support is very similar to the combined support those platforms received.

Nintendo was already making 3D games on the DS with the Zelda games, Super Mario 64 DS, Nintendogs, etc. It's more that the 3DS was when their handheld games began to match the scale and production value of their console releases, which was which was especially noticable given that Nintendo pulled out of the spec wars in the console space starting with the Wii. The Switch basically cuts out the middle man and just consolidates that into one platform.

And I say third party support for Switch is closer to the GBA and DS' in that you have exclusives, handheld style games that happen to be multiplatform, indies, and ports of western console games.

I wasn't on this forum yet, but from what I remember I figured the Wii U would do somewhere in the ballpark of N64 to SNES. If it cracked 50 million, probably not much more than that. 

By late Q1 2013 into Q2 2013, a lot of the writing was on the wall. Nintendo games already had large droughts in 2013, and third-party support was already drying up (which would become more severe from 2014 onward).

Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U in 2014 were the last chance to turn Wii U around, and they didn't. 

If Nintendo made one platform at the time (but it wasn't a hybrid), 3DS probably would have sold a little more if it was on its own and Wii U would have sold a lot more. 

What do you mean by cheating? How does one cheat in the systems selling ways?

I dont think that combining two systems into one is cheating. In fact, I think that this potentially cut into total sales for the 8th generation of gaming consoles for Nintendo. If Nintendo didn't make the Switch a home/handheld combo but just a home console and still appealed to young, old and new fans, the Switch would have most likely sold close to 100 million consoles, much like the Wii. Since Switch would be their home consoles, they would have sold a new handheld (Im gonna call it NH). This NH would have most likely sold a minimum of 80 million, near 3DS numbers. 
Since it's just the Switch, they might be selling maybe 150 million or 160 million (at most) consoles.

Making one console was a huge step for Nintendo, a big risk, and made game development way easier to handle. We will always be able to count on Nintendo for one thing: their ability to innovate technology, and make gaming fun and family friendly.

I think it was meant as a joke

Teraflops isn't everything or a way to determine performance.
I.E. You can have a GPU with MORE teraflops be slower than a GPU with LESS teraflops.
I.E. The Radeon 7850 having almost 1 Teraflop less than a Radeon 5870 is faster.
I have already embarrassingly proven you wrong on this before, but you seem to keep regurgitating the same false information... But here we go again!
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1062?vs=1076
Radeon 7850 is 1,761Gflop, the Radeon 5870 is 2,720Gflop, 7850 wins... And unlike your Comparison both chips are AMD.

But in the case of the Switch... In it's slowest 307Mhz mode it's only a paltry 157Gflop verses the Xbox One 1,310 GFLOP.
That is a 8.3x difference in the Xbox One's favour.

At it's Max clock (I.E. Docked, the mode that NO developer targets games for, they target Handheld mode, but you cherry picked docked mode.) the Switch is 393Gflop.
Meaning when we compare just single precision floating point, it is 1/3rd the capability of an Xbox One.
But in the real world... We are NOT seeing a 2.5x performance uplift going from Handheld to Docked, games don't perform 2.5x better, games don't look 2.5x better.


So we can surmise that:
1) Flops are bullshit in trying to tell us performance and capability.
2) The Switch still has bottlenecks and is held back by it's CPU, Memory, Integer and Storage performance.

The Switch is also based on nVidia Maxwell, Xbox One is based on Graphics Core Next... Everyone and their dog knows that Maxwell isn't very good at asynchronous compute like Graphics Core Next, so in number-crunching "Gflop" capacity, it's never going to get near an equivalent Graphics Core Next part in the real world, let alone one that is orders of magnitude faster.

But it also doesn't have to.

See... The other issue with your usage of Gflops is that... It doesn't tell the entire story, it's a mobile chip.
One GREAT way to save power and increase performance in mobile environments is to actually reduce the rendering precision and leverage FP16 math, which is a very common tactic developers use.

Meaning your "Gflops metric" is useless as it's literally not even used. Not single precision anyway.

Basically what it means is that, when two compatible (Must note the: Compatible!) instructions are used, the Maxwell GPU will combine them both and execute them on the FP32 compute engines, theoretically doubling floating point performance.

Obviously it doesn't and cannot scale like that in the real world.

But it also brings the Switch's base Half Precision floating point up to 314Gflop and a max of 786Gflop.

But these are theoretical numbers, not real world and not representative of actual performance... It's literally a by-product of multiplying Clock Speed, Instructions per clock and functional units and not an actual real-world benchmarked number.

Lol. No.

All those games come with compromises. Often rather significant compromises.

If the Switch leveraged Pascal rather than Maxwell, it could have clocked 50% higher on launch.

Again, your usage of Gflops doesn't tell the entire story as it's a theoretical denominator and not real world performance.

It would never touch an Xbox One or Playstation 4 because it's missing several key ingredients:

1) Ram capacity. 4GB with 1GB of that stolen for the OS, leaving developers with only 3GB is just not enough.
2) Ram Bandwidth. - 25GB/s even with Delta Colour compression is not going to provide the necessary fillrate for lots of alpha effects, resolution or quality Anti-Aliasing.
3) CPU performance. - ARM A57, 4-Cores with 1 core stolen for the OS, clocked at 1Ghz is simply not enough performance for demanding decompression of meshes and textures and support streaming of high-quality assets into the GPU in real time.

Just increasing "Gflops" is useless when literally every aspect of the console is holding it back, creating bottlenecks.

The original Switch chip is capable of 1 Terfaflop when using half precision/rapid packed math.

Nintendo made hardware and software design choices to limit it, those who have cracked and modded their consoles and unlocked their clocks can game at 924Mhz or 473Gflop/946Gflop HP.
Still doesn't get near a Playstation 4. It never will. Even if it was 4 Teraflops.

Games perform better, sure. But often they still perform and look worse than the Playstation 4 and Xbox One version.
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2019-switch-overclocking-analysis

The Switch's Bottleneck is simply more than just Gigaflops that you desperately cling to.

The Vita, Playstation 3+Xbox 360 were completely different from an architectural and technological perspective, architecture matters more than Gflops.
Just like Architecture matters more than "Bits". - Hence why consoles haven't moved from 64bit in decades... And the main reason for 64bit was to address more than 4GB of memory.

The Switch is much slower than 1/3rd of an Xbox One in the real world.

Yes it's running Doom, Hellblade, Witcher and more... But with significant compromises. And they ARE significant.
Still a great experience, but no way are they even remotely comparable releases.

Games like Overwatch and Fortnite are designed to scale to every single possible hardware combination in existence for mass-appeal and market... And thus have opted for clean and simplistic textures and geometry as well as baked lighting and shadowing to enable that scaling.

Games like Harry Potter showcase how limited the Switch really is, it simply doesn't have the memory.
Mortal Kombat 1 for instance was a bit of a joke on Switch.

By this logic, Sony also cheated by withdrawing PSVita support in favor of their home consoles and Microsoft cheated by never offering an Xbox handheld (Xboy?)