It goes without saying Nintendo did not appreciate the huge amount of Switch emulators available for the original Switch and for many that was the only way they play Switch games. Many Switch games were run at 4K 60fps even with graphic enhancements that the community had created. Also the PC hardware required for Switch emulation was fairly low.

Switch 2 docked performance is going to be hard to emulate on many PCs to say the least but portable Switch 2 is another matter. The ARM CPUs are not too tricky to emulate and GPU performance in portable mode is likely well below 1 Teraflop I would guess around 600 gflops so achievable on current hardware even if visually it could be nasty. I.e. a game that natively renders at 360p won't look great emulated if it can't also do clever upscaling.

However there is the real possibility that Nintendo have utterly revamped their security and encryption to make Switch 2 near impossible to crack. I suspect this is unlikely but you never know.

It feels even if Switch 2 is emulated this time around, it could well be the emulation is visually massively inferior to real Switch 2 hardware. Switch 1 games ran better emulated but this may not be the case with Switch 2.

My guess is a crude near useless emulator by Christmas with perhaps 2 years of revisions taking it to a workable state.

Hm...let's see, for something that is considered low spec PC these days - 5600X as CPU is some 9-10x that of Switch 2 CPU docked single core, and some 6-7x multicore, and RTX 3060 12GB is some 4-4.5x of Switch 2 GPU docked - so, I guess it boils done to how different SW2 API is to SW1.

Like with every emulation, there's a progress curve; it starts with sub-par performance and with time, overtakes the emulated hardware. In most of the cases, the performance boost of great emulators came from a single breakthrough moment in development, rather than brute force. My guess is that Switch 2 will be no different and whens and hows depend on how invested and talented the developers are.

It will happen. Life, uh, finds a way.
It will probably be in a very rough state for the first several years. From what I remember, Switch emulation wasn't getting really good until 2021 (I remember hearing people getting Metroid Dread running on PC pretty much right away).

I would guess it will be an issue to the same extent as it was for Switch 1.

For a couple decades now, youth culture's response has been to steal what they can't afford or don't want to buy, so in that sense, if Nintendo keeps insisting on charging eighty dollars for games, they might run into problems. How big that problem turns out to be, is anyone's guess.

Why is it always Nintendo? I mean people can barely emulate PS2 and Xbox games, but GC, Wii, WiiU and Switch is no problem. Its just a bit weird.

The only way to play switch and Switch 2 games is if you purchase the game. If you're going to play them through an emulator, you better at least plunk down the $60 for the game first. Emulation should only be used or preservation of games not available.

PCSX2 runs really good, not sure when you checked it last time. Don't know about OG XBOX, though I think XEMU runs really nice as well.

I think both Xenia for 360 and RPCS3 for PS3 are running very smooth - and it is known that PS3 is hard to emulate.

So I don't think it's only Nintendo, though they somewhat set themselves to be easier to brute-force ever since they technically "skipped" a generation with Wii.

What? I can emulate PS2 games for like 15 years now, it was never a problem for me? 

Wii is the one actually clunk to emulate because many games required the motion controllers. I only emulate FE Radiant Dawn, which don't use motion controls, but something like Mario Galaxy is terrible to play