The gap between home and handheld is smaller than ever.

Sony and MS are locked in the graphics battle even though no company has ever needed graphics to win.

Sony had the CD/DVD player, 360 had online and cheap indy games and Kinect, Wii had motion control, Switch had portability.

Even if we ignore the fact that Nintendo has lost and recaptured every major first party genre (eg GoldenEye to Halo to Splatoon), how are they not poised to dominate worldwide in the same way they currently do in Japan?

Is Nintendo inevitable?

Wrong battlefield. The war will be waged around digital marketplaces, actual hardware on which your game library will be running in the future is irrelevant.

Nah, I've been hearing this same line since like 2009 where people claimed that the 7th gen was the last console generation and that in a few years consoles would be extinct and irrelevant; low and behold it's 2025 and consoles are thriving.

I feel like there's been an overcorrection on the unreasonable level of gloom over the S2 launch.

Sony has strong brand loyalty (to the point that sales don't waver that much based on available exclusives, etc), has been competent on most fronts in 4 out of 5 gens and is now in an even stronger position with Microsoft providing their offerings on the PS5.

The sales show that it's more likely that these 2 succeed alongside each other than anything else.

Those who claimed that are obviously Michael Pachter's "witnesses", so to speak.

Today, it's quite different.

Digital storefronts are undeniably hugely important, but I can't see dedicated hardware becoming irrelevant any time soon; this is one of those things like VR taking off that has been perpetually "5-10 years away" for the last 20 years or so.

There will be multiple hardware options is what I'm saying, not just one - some of it dedicated, some of them less so.

What's important is in which digital marketplace your library is, and on which devices that digital library can be installed.

Okay that I can agree with, its basically what we have now already. Companies still have incentive to lock their to their own hardware and non-competitors though, such as Sony not offering their flagship games on Xbox/Nintendo systems or Nintendo not offering their games on PS/Xbox/PC.

What Nintendo will be doing is anyone's guess.

As for Sony, I'm not so sure - who would've thought that Sony will ever bring their first party exclusives to Steam? And if Steam can be installed on anything (which in not so distant future very well might be, since they've just recently launched beta for Steam on ARM on MAC)...