I think it'll be more comparable overall to the PS4 Pro, which would still be great for a hybrid.

Games will run at lower native resolutions than the average PS4 Pro game, but at higher graphical fidelity and settings.

Which makes sense.  The 3050 did well enough on smaller scope games, like RE4, but with open world it fell apart quite quickly. 

There are ways the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X will be superior to it, mostly in the same way they are to the Series S -- average internal resolution of titles is higher on these consoles. 

But yeah, games should look and run overall better on Switch 2 than they did on PS4 Pro/Xbox One X when you consider all aspects, not just image quality. 

I think the range of quality-per-performance is pretty narrow given what we know, with 8nm vs. 4nm determining if it is at the lower end of this range or upper end (intermediate nodes like 7nm would put it in between.) 8nm probably means Nintendo is going to allow power levels to go much higher in docked mode than they did in the original Switch, because otherwise it doesn't make sense as a node, so that could make up for being less efficient vs. a lower powered 4nm chip. 

Z1 (non-extreme) to RTX 3050 (Laptop) includes systems that all perform pretty similarly. Those are basically what you get in entry level $400-$500 gaming laptops or RDNA 3 mini-PCs/handhelds of a similar price. So $400 shouldn't be a stretch for Nintendo, and they might have some budget leeway to add a nicer display. 

I don't think most console gamers would complain or really notice the difference between this level of performance and the Series S. It basically amounts to a resolution difference that most casual gamers don't perceive well, especially if DLSS can make up some of the difference by being superior to console FSR. 

At $499 I could potentially see Switch 2 slotting in between PS4 Pro and XBSS maybe, but I'm guessing that even though Nin might want to hit that mark, I'm figuring they're going to play it at least a little safe because that's been their approach since Wii in terms of hardware performance.

I think Nin knowing where PS5 and XBSX were in terms of performance and price in 2020, and where they are now, still at $499, to me Nin would likely want to come in below that, and companies in general, especially console companies, like to launch with $99 pricing instead of $49. This makes me assume Nin would probably go with a $399 price point, and since they are very unlikely to subsidize, that means the hardware will be worth around $399 itself. Even if Nin went with a $449 price, that could very well end up being $50 in profit per unit.

A big factor will be how hard Nin decides to push the docked mode. Switch was pretty tame in terms of docked performance, so will Nin do the same this time, bump it up a fair bit more, or push it as hard as they reasonably can?

As you say though, we don't know anything for certain and we're just guessing with what we think we know, which doesn't hold much water at the moment. The closer consoles get to launch however, the more whittled down and more accurate the leaks tend to become, so we may not be too far off either.

But it comes at a cost to visual quality.
The Series S games do look and run better than the One X/Playstation 4 Pro, it's just a softer output.

Yeah, the next paragraph addresses that. 

"But yeah, games should look and run overall better on Switch 2 than they did on PS4 Pro/Xbox One X when you consider all aspects, not just image quality. "

I think Switch 2 will be largly a 30 fps machine for third party games. But given the graphics quality Nintendo aims for in their own games I could see 60 fps being standard. We had many 30 fps exclusives this and past year, and new Zelda coming this week is 30 fps as well on Switch 1.

Undocked -> Around Xbox One/PS4
Docked -> around PS4 pro
Not quite on XSS due to limits on bandwidth.

But maybe it is more than enough. One of the most visually stunning games nowadays are last gen games.
Look at Horizon forbidden west, ghost of tsushima, even rise son of rome.
Include new technology that boost FPS and resolution, adds ray-tracing, switch 2 would be OK.

Specifically, I think DLSS has a greater potential than we see today on PCs.
It is a general model for all kind of visuals, however, in Deep learning, finetuning models for specific tasks is what is really boosting results.
They could include in the dev kits the necessary software for finetunning the DLSS models specific for each game.
Giving it is a fixed hardware, you know exactly what to expect from the native render target from the switch 2 version. And finetune the DLSS to this specific pairs. Nowadays we have methods such LoRA that allow fast finetune, and having to store only the difference from the general model.
I think this different would be bigger for smaller (720 or lower) render resolutions, where DLSS struggle the most.